


The Gilded Cage

by quietprofanity



Category: Watchmen (Comic)
Genre: Anti-Fixit Fic, BDSM, Mindfuck, Multi, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-05
Updated: 2011-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-25 17:38:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietprofanity/pseuds/quietprofanity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adrian Veidt won’t let Dan leave Karnak.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic contains sexual situations and others that could be triggering. While this fanfic involves some romance, I do not consider it a traditional porn or pairing fanfic, and in some ways the pairing list while accurate should not be taken as an indicator of what you see in this fanfic.

_“Conquest is not the victory itself; but  
the acquisition, by victory, of a right over  
the persons of men. He therefore that is slain  
is overcome, but not conquered: he that is taken  
and put into prison or chains is not conquered,  
though overcome; for he is still an enemy, and  
may save himself if he can: but he that upon  
promise of obedience hath his life and liberty  
allowed him, is then conquered and a subject;  
and not before.”_

\-- Thomas Hobbes, _Leviathan_

 _“Suicide kills two people. That’s what  
it’s for.”_

\-- Arthur Miller, _After the Fall_

~*~*~

Dan wakes up, and Laurie feels cold.

At first this doesn’t bother him. He assumes it must be the Antarctic chill. He reaches up to her hand, the one draped over his body, to warm it. His eyes shoot open. It’s stiff.

Dan wrenches himself from her grasp, his heart thundering, the blood rushing through his ears. He tries to hold on to the hope that his senses were wrong when her arm – the arm that held him so close as he drifted off to sleep – drops to the ground. He shakes her. She doesn’t move.

She’s not breathing.

“Laurie! No, no, no. Laurie!”

He pushes her on her back and takes it all in: her brown hair spread out around her, the long streaks of makeup smudged along her face even though the tears have long dried, her painted pink lips covered in foam. The image burns into his brain, and then he can’t see anything through the tears.

He wipes his eyes. “Rorschach!” he calls out, before he realizes his friend is probably long gone. “Jon! Jon, are you here? Jon!”

There is no answer.

Dan grasps Laurie close, cries into her shoulder. His sobs echo in the opulent, empty pool room. He inhales, taking in her scent – her hair, her skin, her perfume – laced with the almond smell of cyanide. He remembers something Adrian said.

Dan gropes about the floor for his clothes, fights to steady his hands as he pulls them on. Before he puts on his goggles he looks down at Laurie, and the light reflects off one of her earrings like a tiny star. In an impulse he isn’t sure he understands, he bends down and takes it off. At first Dan opens a compartment of his belt, but then worries it may be taken from him at the end. So instead he slips it inside his left glove until it reaches the palm. The earring grinds into it as he makes a fist.

Nite Owl has no weapons, at least none that will kill. That’s okay, he thinks as he delicately covers Laurie beneath the pelt of his snowsuit. When he meets Adrian, he won’t need them.

He feels every word of his swear. They carry him up the stairs of Karnak, lead him to its owner’s sanctum, guide his fists and his feet as he attacks. They make him strong. They make him ferocious. They make him feel like he’s on fire.

And, as Adrian picks up a statuette on the wall, knocks it against Dan’s head and Dan feels the world spin around him, Dan realizes they are utterly, utterly useless.

~*~*~

The pain throbs through Dan’s head like lightning bolts, jars him awake. At first he can’t focus, tries to get his bearings and vomits on himself. Then he feels the cuffs around his wrists, around his ankles, holding him spread-eagled on a bed. It wakes him up. He thrashes.

“You’ll hurt yourself,” says a familiar voice above him.

He opens his eyes to see Adrian standing over him, a syringe in hand. Adrian jabs the needle into Dan’s neck, and the pain is gone.

~*~*~

It’s better when he wakes up again, when he’s had a chance to fully assess his surroundings.

His head has been bandaged, and since he can’t smell blood he hopes the wound has closed. His clothes have been changed. Instead of his Nite Owl suit he wears what looks like white cotton pajamas. There’s a large, pinkish stain across the chest. It’s probably where he vomited but it’s now dry, as if were cleaned off him as best as possible already.

Sunlight pours into the room, which is small, sparse and empty. The window where it’s coming from is behind his head, and a door a few feet from the foot of the bed offers hope of an escape. There are some nails in the wall, and in the bright sunlight Dan can see the shapes on the wall where the paint is darker. Furniture outlines, he realizes. Decorations. Whatever was here is now gone. All that’s left is the bed and a wood chair, a black box sitting on top of it.

He tries to pull on his bonds, and his wrists scream in protest. He looks up at his left hand to see blood trickle down from beneath the cuffs. “Shit,” he whispers.

Dan rests his face against the pillow. He can feel slight friction as the beginnings of a beard brush against it. He waits. Sometimes he sleeps. Sometimes he thinks of Laurie and he cries softly to himself. Then, when he can’t cry anymore, he continues to wait.

Once, when he closes his eyes, he dreams. He’s still tied up, but now he’s in his costume, and she is standing over him. Her black leather glove squeaks against the skin of his cheek, her red lips are an inch from his and her breath smells like perfume.

“ _Now, Dan_ ,” she whispers as she runs the riding crop along his body, “ _This is for your own good._ ”

Dan wakes up, and Adrian is there. He’s wearing one of his purple suits now, smiles at him with a teacher’s amused indulgence. On the bed, Dan edges away from him as much as he can.

“Scared?” Adrian asks, amusement in his voice.

Dan flexes his hands into fists, glares at Adrian. “No.”

Adrian chuckles. “I wouldn’t be offended if you were. A less empathetic person would be far less judicious to someone who tried to take his life. Actually,” his voice goes deep. “I think you have every reason to be afraid.”

Dan is afraid. He’s tied and beaten and feels as defenseless as he’s ever been. But he also feels he has to fight.

“I’m not afraid of you, you monster!”

The slap across his face is hard and quick, rattles his injured head. Adrian grabs his face by the chin, holds it in place so he looks at Adrian.

“You disappoint me, Dan. What did I tell you about the futility of your schoolboy heroics? I’d thought I’d been able to get through to you when you agreed to keep silent, but I was obviously mistaken. You still cling to your games like a child.”

Dan spits in his face. Adrian growls, slaps Dan again. Dan groans against the pillow as Adrian stalks away. From his vantage point on the bed, Dan can hear Adrian murmur.

“Never mind. All children can be made to learn.” Adrian turns around. “Do you feel hungry?”

Dan won’t move.

“No? Thirsty? You’ve been in bed for two days. You will soon.”

Dan closes his eyes, listens to the click of the door closing. Is that what it’s going to come down to? he wonders. Choosing to die of thirst? Or starve? He stares up at the ceiling, tries to be strong.

~*~*~

He’s not.

It’s two days later, or so Adrian tells him. It’s hard for Dan to keep time. Whenever he opens his eyes it’s bright. Adrian will only let Dan have the water if he agrees not to hurt him. The cuffs come off. Dan sits on the bed as he gulps it down.

“So,” Adrian says. He’s sitting across from Dan, but Dan won’t look at him, is staring at his reflection in the glass. “Now that you’ve behaved, there are things we need to discuss about your future.”

“Future?” Dan asks.

“Yes, future. You’re in a rather precar –”

Dan jumps up and smashes the glass against one of the bedposts. He keeps the largest glass shard in his right hand, wraps his left around Adrian’s throat.

“I had a future,” he raises the shard, and in his mind it’s like a sword. “You took her from me.”

Dan swings and Adrian catches his wrist with a hard squeeze. Dan’s fingers instinctively drop the shard. When it hits the ground, Adrian steps on it, obliterating it with a crunch.

“Really, now.”

Adrian slams Dan down and tears spring to Dan’s eyes as his wound knocks against the floor. Then Adrian starts to kick.

When he is done Dan can barely move, can barely breathe. He tastes blood in his mouth. It’s from his lips, he realizes. He bit them trying to work through the pain.

“I see I’ve made a mistake,” Adrian says. He’s standing above Dan. The heel of his perfect suede shoe digs hard into Dan’s chest. “It seems your confinement has taught you the wrong lesson. You haven’t learned from your defeat. Instead, you glory in your suffering.”

Adrian removes his leg off Dan, reaches down to pick up Dan’s left hand. Dan groans as Adrian presses it against the shards of glass on the floor.

“This isn’t glorious, Dan,” Adrian says. “This pain you feel? It’s not defiance. It’s not rebellion. It’s pain.”

Adrian twists Dan’s hand against the shards, and Dan yells again. Then he lets him go, walks toward the door. Dan brings the hand to his face. It’s hard to see the shards without his eyeglasses, but he can feel them sticking in his palm.

“But that’s not truly important,” Adrian says. Dan twists around to look at him, and every movement feels like another kick. “What you need to realize is it’s in your best interest that I’m alive, that you do what I say. If confinement doesn’t teach you that, perhaps freedom will.”

The door closes again. Dan tries to get up, to chase after him, but the action never gets beyond a thought.

~*~*~

Hours later – Dan doesn’t know how many hours – he wakes up. It hurts to raise his head, to use his left hand, even to sit. But he’s out of the cuffs, and even if it means playing into Adrian’s hand the change of the situation gives him a renewed sense of purpose, lets him forget the pain.

It’s still daylight when he wakes up. The door to the room is open, and it leads to a hallway. The hallway’s not much bigger than the room, and that only surprises him because he knows he must still be at Karnak, and the enormous rooms where he fought Adrian and made love to Laurie (oh God, Laurie …) don’t match his surroundings. Like the room, the hallway also has no decorations, just bare nails and wire on the wall, although with no windows there is no faded paint. The hallway leads to five other doors.

“The Lady or the Tiger?” Dan asks.

The door adjacent to his own is the bathroom, and he’s surprised at his overwhelming relief, his gratefulness, when he sees it. It’s a normal American bathroom: full toilet, standing shower, sink, mirror on a medicine cabinet mounted to the wall. That interests him the most. He looks inside: new soap, half-used toothpaste, a quarter-filled bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a mostly-empty bottle of alcohol, adhesive strips, bandages. There’s a notable absence of any pills, scissors or razors.

Dan turns on the tap, puts his hand under when the water. When he’s done, he dumps the hydrogen peroxide over it. With no tweezers or eyeglasses it feels like a useless gesture, but he can remove the few glass pieces he can see with his fingernails, which have grown a bit longer. It’ll hurt for awhile. It may scar, but infection is unlikely. It’s a small favor.

It’s a tricky task, but he rips a swath of the bandage off the roll using his teeth and the right leverage. He’s about to wrap it around his hand, but he realizes taking a shower might be better first.

First the head wound. Dan finds the bandage’s knot, unties it and unravels the bandages. There’s blood along his hairline, and he touches his scalp with careful fingers. The pain is there, but it’s like a bruise. He’ll know better after he showers. Dan removes the clothes he’s wearing, trying not to look at them and the patterns of human waste he’s left on them. He reaches for the soap in the cabinet and steps inside.

It’s a natural routine, one he might take if he were in a hotel, ready to go downstairs to the ornithological conference. Yet he doesn’t feel like he’s at a hotel, or a colleague’s guest room, or even where he actually is – a makeshift dungeon. It’s the toothpaste that creeps him out, he thinks as he lets the water run over his body. The bottles of peroxide and alcohol could have been emptied before, a measure – like the missing razors and scissors – intended to prevent him from killing himself or others. There would have been no reason to do that to the toothpaste. It means people lived here. People hung things on the walls and made this prison a home. Where are they now?

~*~*~

There were three of them, he realizes. Maybe more – maybe they could have bunked up. No, probably not, he decides. Three. One for each of the empty bedrooms.

The other room is a kitchen. There’s food in the fridge, in the cabinets, but since there’s no silverware and the oven has been broken he won’t be making any fine dining anytime soon. He rifles through the cabinets, finds boxes and cans of food with writing he doesn’t understand. Maybe it’s Chinese. Or not. He can’t tell.

He finds some eggs in the refrigerator. He needs to conserve, he tells himself. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be alone, how long this will last. He breaks an egg on the counter, leans his head back as he drops the yolk down his throat. It’s borderline disgusting but he’s ravenous, and despite his chiding to himself, he eats six.

Dan feels slightly sick when he’s done. He sits on the floor of the empty kitchen with his head in his hands. The tile on the floor is a light purple and black, and like the bedrooms, decorations have been removed. Right now, though, he doesn’t care about the three. He thinks about Rorschach raiding his kitchen. Not recently, when Rorschach came to warn Dan about Blake, but years ago, when he’d come into his penthouse smelling of blood and rambling about retribution and the lack of God, the meaninglessness of life. He wonders why that memory comes to mind now.

The room is so, so quiet. And now, showered and fed, he feels almost normal. He feels almost like he’s just been through an especially vivid nightmare. He wants to believe it, for these routines are so seductive, so ordinary.

Then Dan tries the last door, the one he’d been avoiding. It’s locked. When he slams against it there’s no give, and he realizes behind the wood door there’s something much harder, something he can’t break.

When he came here, when he was out in the snow, he doesn’t remember shivering as hard as he is now.

~*~*~

A clock. He understands the razors, the scissors, the broken oven, the rooms emptied of all life except one bed, one chair and a change of clothes (black pants and a purple shirt with an eastern-style collar). But why the fuck on God’s white waste of an earth couldn’t he have had a clock? Something on the wall. Or a wristwatch. Why not? What did Adrian think he would do, use his non-existent tools to rig it into a bomb?

Nice idea, but he knows his own limits.

He has no way of keeping track of time. He can’t trust his body to keep him abreast of the cycle of the day. Bereft of stimulation, hunger and exhaustion are ever-present. He plays tricks with himself, trying to stave off his urges to eat, his urges to sleep, for just a little longer. Name all the states and capitals. Who were your childhood teachers? What happened on each of your birthdays? Sometimes he closes his eyes and tries to reconstruct his favorite movies, letting his memory linger over every absorbed detail, every line of dialogue.

It would be better if it weren’t for the sun. For a long time, Dan would spend time looking out the shatterproof window in “his” room, hoping for a glimpse of a bird, trying to connect this empty expanse to the nights when he and his parents would go on winter trips to upstate New York or Vermont. His favorite part was always dusk, when the snow would glow blue in the fading light.

But it’s summer in Antarctica. There is no dusk here. There is no night. While clouds occasionally cover the sun, inducing in him a feeling of a gloomy Sunday morning (“Gloooooomy Sundaaaaay,” he sings to himself), most days are brutally bright, and the few shadows in the room barely move. He tries to fool himself into thinking it’s night sometimes. He hides under the bed, covers his face in the stained pajamas, but the red light always seeps through his eyelids, reminds him it is day. Always, always day.

~*~*~

He misses Laurie the most, so he tries to think about her the least. Whenever he does, the experience is wrenching. In his grief-stricken mind, the memory of their short time has no flaw. Even his embarrassments are superseded by their glorious night together. Yet he can’t think about that either. Whenever he does, whenever he closes his eyes to try to remember the texture of her hair, the feel of her skin, the taste of her mouth, he smells cyanide.

He thinks of Hollis a little more. Sometimes Dan can smile thinking of their evenings together, just talking. It’s best to think only of the surface of these things: the taste of the beer, the smell of Hollis’ cigarettes, the feel of Phantom II’s fur against his hand. It’s when he tries to remember the things Hollis told him, all the stories of his time alone and with the Minutemen, that Dan can’t bear it. Dan has failed him by so much.

When he’s at his worst, his most pathetic and needy, he thinks of Twilight Lady. He remembers their nights together. The cuffs and the ties. The leather and the whip.

“ _You know_ ,” she would whisper, pausing to let her tongue trace his ear, “ _it’s totally legal so long as we don’t fuck. I could play with you forever._ ” Her hands would drop to his stomach, to his groin. “ _No one could say a thing._ ”

Sometimes he remembers those nights with joy and aching, longs to be back in that dark, blissful embrace of sex and surrender. Other times it makes him angry and sick. He was young and he deluded himself into thinking he was dangerous, into thinking capture was a game.

When he can muster up the strength to be hopeful, he thinks about Rorschach.

There’s a possibility, slim as it is, that Rorschach will come back for him. He’s sure Rorschach could have reached Archie and started it. He maybe could have been able to get it back to America. When he thinks about what might have happened to Rorschach when he got back – the reception that would greet an escaped felon with a crazy story about how the world’s smartest, most beloved peacemaker dropped a monster in New York – he’s less sure. Yet Dan saved Rorschach, didn’t he? Doesn’t Rorschach owe him the same if he can? Won’t Rorschach eventually notice that he hasn’t come home? That Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre haven’t been seen?

Although maybe Rorschach will think they’re hiding from him and … no, no. If Rorschach wanted to find Dan, he would. Dan knows this.

In his most ridiculous moments, he thinks of what it’ll be like when Rorschach rescues him. He’ll burst down the door, run to his side. Dan will be so, so grateful. He’ll cling to Rorschach and tell him … tell him … oh God, Dan doesn’t know. He only knows that the idea of it is the only thing that makes him feel in this blinding white hell.

There has to be a chance this will happen, he tells himself. There has to.

~*~*~

He talks to God. He hasn’t in years but now he’s trying to dig up every scrap of Hebrew he remembers. Prayers from the siddur and bits of song. They’re probably useless. Just praises to God for welcoming the Sabbath, and how can you have the Sabbath in a land where the sun doesn’t set?

Sometimes he says the Mourner’s Kaddish. When he does this he thinks about Laurie and Hollis. It probably doesn’t work that way, probably is something only meant for Jews. But what else can he do for them?

Some Jews must have died from Adrian’s monster, Dan thinks. He imagines their rabbis – old and black-robed and long-bearded, young in gray suits and skullcaps, maybe even a few women, although he’s never met one and can’t picture them – standing on the bimahs in New York City, reading long lists of names. Maybe they’ve missed one. Maybe Dan is helping them.

He makes bargains. I’ll keep the Sabbath. I’ll keep kosher. I won’t even eat corn syrup during Passover. I’ll never complain about Yom Kippur, I’ll stay in the synagogue all day and listen to every word of every prayer. No, I’ll do that for everything. Every word a person says to me. Every song I hear. I’ll tune none of it out. I’ll treasure every second I get with another human being on this planet.

He makes the promises even though he knows if he gets out he’ll be a fugitive. He’ll manage it, somehow. He has to, he will, just as long as someone lets him out of these rooms.

God never answers, although he does get the next best thing.

~*~*~

“Jon!”

He just appears in the room, his body turned toward the window, when Dan is trying to sleep. Dan pulls himself out from under the bed, and Jon looks at him with shock.

“Dreiberg? What happened to you?”

An image of himself, taken from the last time he looked in the mirror (he doesn’t know how long ago that was, some things he’s stopped caring about), comes to Dan’s mind: the thick beard, the long nails, the suit that’s become looser on his body.

“Adrian’s been holding me here. I don’t know how long,” he stumbles toward Jon, grasps onto his shoulders. “How’d you find me? Is Rorschach here? Oh God! Have you found Adrian? We need to find him. He killed Laurie!”

Dan watches as the surprise on Jon’s face fades into sadness. Jon’s mouth drops a bit, and then he speaks. “I apologize for any misunderstanding. I did not know you were here, and I have not come to rescue you.”

Dan looks up at Jon, looks for any hint that Jon could be lying, but it’s Jon and if everything Laurie told him about Jon was true, then he wouldn’t lie. “But … but you’re here. You’ll help me, won’t you?”

Jon blinks, and then sighs. “So often I have tried to be only a watcher of life. I create life now. I have watched generations of life in it’s smallest, most fragile form – things scientists have not yet discovered – live, grow and die since last I saw you, trying to be distant, trying to watch life in all its natural processes. Yet it seems even the act of watching has an influence. It imposes meaning. Sometimes I cannot see clearly because of this. Perhaps that is one of the fallacies of science. Perhaps you can understand when you watch your birds.”

Dan can only stare back in response. What?

“Jon, what the fuck are you talking about? Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? Haven’t you heard Laurie is dead?”

“Yes, yes, and that does upset me. I’m sorry. I’ve seen much death these days. Feelings tend to get confused. You should sit. I have more to do here, and we will talk while I work.”

Dan sits on the bed, rubbing his eyes. He feels the mattress bounce slightly as Jon sits next to him.

“I came here out of curiosity,” Jon says. “I’m in many places in Karnak at this moment, checking the rooms for Adrian, and I cannot find him. I’m watching his televisions. I will eventually see him there, see that a problem is arising in New York, and he is fixing it.”

“He’s … he’s not even here?” Dan twists his body to look at Jon. “He’s left me here to die?”

“I do not know that,” Jon says. “I thought I would see him, but I will not. Our conversation will convince me not to get involved.”

Dan moans. “Oh God. Why is he doing this? What does he want? Why didn’t he kill me along with Laurie if he wants me to die here?”

“It is strange,” Jon admits. “It’s the sort of sadism I would expect from Blake, were he alive. I suspect Adrian has other motives at work, although I cannot guess what they are. His desires are fully unlike most human beings I have met.”

Dan snorts. “As if he’s human at all …”

“I cannot expect you to be objective about this, given your situation, but we must remember …” Jon stops, stares as if he’s noticed something. Dan looks around and sees nothing.

“What? What is it?”

“I am sorry. Elsewhere I’m looking through the old tapes of the security cameras. I see … oh dear.”

“Who? What? Is it Rorschach? Is he here?”

Jon lowers his head. “Dreiberg, Rorschach won’t be coming for you. I am not watching new tapes, anyway. I am watching old ones, and at the time I am watching, he is already dead.”

Dan can’t speak. Dead? he asks himself. Rorschach’s dead? He knew it could happen. The rational part of his mind, the part that he hated to listen to, told him Rorschach’s death was very likely. It’s not the same as hearing it, though. It’s not the same at all.

“I’m watching the video,” Jon says. “I’m watching you and Laurie, sleeping in the pool room.”

He was dead before then? Dan can’t believe any of this.

“I see her waking up beside you. She looks like she wants to cry, but she doesn’t. I’ve never seen her like this before. I’ve seen her sad so many times but … she’s moving her hand over you, like she’s ready to shake you awake. She pauses. She doesn’t do it.”

“Laurie?” Dan whispers, as if she’s alive, as if she can hear. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Jon says. “She’s walking away from you. She’s naked. I can’t see anymore. She’s out of the camera frame. I’m searching through tapes of the other rooms, watching on the multiple screens. Ah, I’ve found her. She’s in the display room. She’s looking through the weapons. Her finger runs along the edge of a sword. She doesn’t bleed. I suppose it’s dull.”

“Are you saying that Laurie …?”

“She’s found an urn, is looking at it like she doesn’t know why it’s there. She’s opened it There are pills inside. She breaks one. She smells what’s inside. She takes out another and grasps it to her chest. She’s crying again.”

The image comes together for Dan before Jon can describe it. Her coming back to him, nestling up against him, maybe giving a gesture of good-bye before …. His fingers claw at the bed sheets. He trembles.

“Jon.” He squeezes the name past the lump in his throat. “How did Rorschach die?”

Jon returns Dan’s desperate, pleading stare with a look of sadness. “Dreiberg, I don’t think you want to …”

“Tell me!” Dan knows it’s bad, knows he won’t like what he hears, but if his heart needs to break, let it all break now. Hearing about Laurie makes him want to howl, and he can’t go through this pain again.

Jon closes the small, shining stars of his eyes, opens them when he speaks. “You must understand. Adrian had done so much to create the peace, ruined so many lives. I am not without feeling, despite what you may think. I take what Adrian said about the greater tragedy of undoing the peace millions died for to heart. It strikes me on a personal level, thinking of Wally, of what will surely happen to Janey. As you know, Rorschach didn’t understand that. I tried to stop him, but he insisted on going back. I … I couldn’t allow that to happen.”

Jon turns away from Dan. “He allowed me no other solution. Dreiberg, he begged me to do it …”

“ _I keep wanting to cry,_ ” Dan hears Laurie say, “ _but my throat. It’s not big enough._ ”

“How …,” Dan’s voice cracks. “How could you?”

“Life is precious. If I were to allow their sacrifice to come undone …”

“‘Life is precious?’” Dan yells. “What about his life? Didn’t his matter? For that matter, what about Laurie’s life? You keep saying you’re upset but it’s like she didn’t even mean anything to you. Is the woman you loved less than some microbe?”

Jon glares at him. “You do not know what I feel, Dreiberg. You accuse me of a lack of feeling? Think of what you’ve done to me and ask yourself how a man of more ‘feeling’ would deal with you!”

Dan shakes with rage. His first instinct is to spit back at Jon every ugly thing Laurie ever said about him. Then he wants to scream things that are unhelpful and unfair. Do you know how much you hurt her? Why’d you keep her from me if you couldn’t love her the way she needed? Who gave you the authority to decide you could kill him? If you’re so fucking powerful, why couldn’t you have just stopped this?

Yet his anger ultimately can’t outlast his grief. He’s lost Rorschach. He’s lost Laurie a second time.

Jon stands up, turns his back as Dan starts to cry.

“As I wanted to say before, I see even the act of observation, of watching, hurts human beings. How much more would interference?”

“You … you’re not going to help me out? You won’t set me free?”

Jon says nothing for a moment. “I apologize.”

“No!” Dan chokes, stands up. “No, please. Don’t leave me here. I can’t stay here. I’m running out of food. I can’t stand this light and my thoughts and … please, I can’t be alone!”

But then, in a flash of blue light, he is.

It starts with a scream that turns into a screech. Then screaming isn’t enough. The doors crack in half, splinter under his kicks. He rips the remnants off the hinges. The chair is next, then the bed. He uses the debris to smash the ceramic sink, the toilet. Then he tries the mirror, but it won’t shatter, shows him back his haggard, overgrown complexion.

Of course, he thinks. He could use the pieces to kill himself, and wouldn’t that be a shame?

He lies on the bathroom floor, surrounded by the ceramic pieces. He’s all out of screaming, and mostly out of tears. Eventually, he sleeps.

~*~*~

The straps are tight around his wrists, so tight that when he pulls on them he bleeds. Yet they don’t hurt. Not really. Twilight Lady stands in front of him, and when she’s with him, here in the dark, nothing ever really hurts.

Her boot wraps about his leg. She clings to him and her breasts press hard against his chest as she runs her fingers through his hair. Dan opens his mouth and they’re kissing. There’s a sick feeling in his stomach. She’s so beautiful, so sexy, but …

“I … I’m sorry,” he says. “I can’t …”

“ _It’s okay. We don’t have to rush things._ ”

Dan’s eyes open. Oh God, he thinks, that’s not her voice.

Laurie pulls away from him. As she looks into his eyes she’s smiling, but the makeup is running down her cheeks.

“ _We’ve got as long as it takes,_ ” she says, her mouth filling up with foam.

“No!”

She falls, lying in a heap at his feet. Dan pulls against his bonds, but even though she’s so close, he can’t reach her.

“ _Pathetic,_ ” a voice rasps.

Dan looks up, his heart pounding. Rorschach walks toward him, a white light behind him. He pulls open his trenchcoat, lets it slide off his body.

“ _Thousands dead, Daniel._ ” His jacket comes off. He pulls loose his scarf, rips open his shirt to reveal a blood-stained undershirt. Behind him the light is getting bigger. “ _Thousands dead and this is where I find you._ ”

Dan inhales sharply. With a swift motion Rorschach pulls off his mask and hat, revealing his face. Black streaks, like makeup, like ink, run down from his eyes. The light behind him is so bright, so close.

“ _This is how you help me?_ ” he asks.

Dan tries to scream, but nothing comes out as the light engulfs Rorschach, blinds Dan.

He wakes, but the relief he feels only lasts a moment before he remembers they’re gone, remembers the pain. It’s always like this now. It probably always will be.

~*~*~

It isn’t too much longer.

Dan sits in the hall, his legs pulled to his chest, his head buried in his knees. He looks up as there’s a rattling behind the door: the impenetrable one, the one that won’t break. It opens and Adrian is there, dressed immaculately in a tight purple sweater and black pants, handcuffs in his hands. His eyes look over Dan like he’s a ledger, like Adrian’s calculating some sort of work done.

“ _Fucker,_ ” a high pitched voice inside Dan whispers. “ _Asshole._ ”

A small smile tugs at the end of Adrian’s lips. He holds up the cuffs. “Come, Dan.”

“ _Don’t,_ ” says another voice, gruff and raspy now. “ _You can’t._ ”

“Dan?” Adrian asks, a harder edge to his voice now.

Dan stands up, holds out his wrists. He doesn’t even wince as the cuffs click around them.

~*~*~

“You may not believe me, but I meant to come back earlier,” Adrian walks along the table in the dining hall, his finger tracing the edge. He pulls it up and checks for dust. “Seems your friend had what he thought was a trump card. No matter. It’s been taken care of before too much damage was done.”

Dan sits at the head of the table, his hands cuffed in front of him. He’s in the same seat where he and Rorschach attacked Adrian. He feels small here, wants to slump down in the chair. He isn’t used to being in a place with this much space anymore.

“ _Means to intimidate you. Letting him win._ ”

“What did he do?” Dan asks.

“That’s not your concern.” Adrian slams his hand down on the table, making Dan flinch. “We have much to discuss, and while I appreciate your new cooperation, I’m smart enough to know that you’re capable of another outburst. And I will not abide that.”

“ _Outburst? What are you, a child?_ ”

“Let me tell you a bit about of your situation. I’m a hands-on type of businessman. I don’t leave things to contractors. I know every inch of Karnak: its steel doors, its impenetrable walls. With a push of a button I can see anywhere I want. And if I’m not looking, I have a myriad amount of security systems. Now, you’re a smart man. I found out you were the one who connected this all to me. That’s impressive. I’d like to think you’d have had a harder time if I hadn’t made my password so easy to guess, but still, impressive.”

“ _As if he respects you …_ ”

“So, perhaps you could escape. It’s a reasonable possibility. I’m as fallible as any other human being.”

“ _Oh, he doesn’t believe that for a fucking second, Dan._ ”

“If you get out, we’re thousands of miles from the nearest scientific outpost. Now, I haven’t been able to find your ship. Maybe you could reach that, but the Antarctic winds are far from the best conditions for a little craft. And it’s been over a month.

“Still,” Adrian moves so that he’s sitting on the table, his arms crossed in front of him, “maybe I’ve underestimated you. Maybe you can get out, can fly your ship home. Then you have to ask yourself, ‘why?’ ‘Why would I do that?’ You’re a fugitive and a criminal. In addition to illegal vigilantism, you’ve aided a dangerous killer in escaping prison, burglarized my office and attempted to murder me. How do you think the police would deal with you? Even if you were to hide, do you think I wouldn’t do everything in my power to find you?”

“ _Nothing is so hopeless, Daniel. Nothing._ ”

“You may think you have a trump card in what you know, in your connections. You have quite a bit of money. Enough to afford a very, very good lawyer, certainly. I don’t know what sort of lawyer would argue that it was right for you to kill one of the world’s most respected philanthropists because you were under the bizarre delusion that he was going to kill half New York with a fake space alien, but I suppose ‘temporary insanity’ is as good an explanation as any. You were grieving over your lover’s suicide, after all. It’s reasonable.”

Adrian leans forward. His face is almost an inch from Dan’s. Dan stares straight ahead, won’t look into his eyes.

“Do you know how much money I make, Dan?”

Dan shrugs.

“Oh come on, guess.”

“More than me,” Dan drones.

“Even with the recent economic crash, I’m going to make multiple times your worth in one year.”

“That’s great. I’m happy for you.”

The backhand slap cracks across his face. Dan bites his lip through the pain, and then looks back at Adrian.

“ _What are you doing? Fight! Hit him back!_ ”

“If you can put aside the sarcasm, answer the real question. You can afford a very good lawyer. Do you think I can’t afford a better one? Or buy yours out? Do you really think you could win?”

Dan doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.

“So,” Adrian says, drawing the word out like it’s a piece of candy he’s trying to savor. “What’s next for our little hero? Prison. Not a nice prison, either. Not a prison where you get a kitchen and a private working bathroom – if you hadn’t broken it, anyway. A prison full of the people you put away. Your friend was able to survive it for a little while,” he grabs Dan’s collar, holds him still. “Will you be?”

“ _Don’t need to do this. Don’t need to compromise. Can find a way._ ”

“No,” Dan says. “I guess not.”

Adrian stands up, lets his fingers run through Dan’s hair as walks behind the chair, pets Dan’s head.

“ _Don’t let him treat you like this!_ ”

“Here are your real options.” Adrian paces the length of the table, his back to Dan. “You are not leaving Karnak. Ever. This is not negotiable,” he reaches the opposite end, stops and looks back. “You can, however, choose how to spend your time. If you feel the need for more tantrums, you can go back to the servants’ quarters. I’ll bring you more food – I’m not a monster, but otherwise it’ll be much like it was before.”

Dan imagines the prospect, can’t stop himself from shaking.

“ _Are you a man? Don’t show him weakness. Don’t show him you’re soft._ ”

“Or, you could stay with me.”

Dan blinks. “What?”

“When I’m at Karnak, anyway.” Adrian folds his hands behind his back. “I don’t know where I’ll put you when I’m off to business in America. Wherever it is, you’ll have luxuries. More food, books, films, music … whatever else you want within reason. I can’t allow you to make any more toys, but you don’t really need them anymore. You’ll be comfortable, have most of what you need.”

“ _Like he knows what you need? Like he knows what you want?_ ”

“And what do I do? Am I going to be your servant?”

“Servant?” Adrian asks, genuine surprise in his voice. “There’s nothing you can do for me I can’t provide for myself, Dan. No, you are my prisoner. If you behave, you get the better cage. That’s all.”

Dan’s heart pounds as Adrian circles the other end of the table. The weight of the prospect in front of him feels closer, more ominous, as Adrian advances.

“ _Don’t do it._ ”

“ _You can’t accept this, Dan. It isn’t right._ ”

“ _Wants to make you his pet._ ”

“ _He’s a murderer! You want to spend the rest of your life living with a murderer? Pretending what he did was okay?_ ”

“ _Can’t eat out of his hand. Even in the face of madness, have to defy him._ ”

“ _It’s not right, Dan._ ”

“ _It’s not right._ ”

Adrian is at his side, has his hand on Dan’s shoulder. In his mind’s eye, though, Adrian doesn’t matter. They do. They stare at him from their seats at the table, and for a moment his heart swells with grief under the blank, reflective plane of black on white, under the sadness and desperation in her eyes. Then, in another moment, his grief shatters into anger and they are gone.

They’ve abandoned him.

“What do you say?” Adrian asks, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “Are you willing to be good? Are you willing to behave?”

Dan nods. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

End Part One.


	2. Chapter 2

_“We have beaten you, Winston.  
We have broken you up. You can see   
what your body is like. Your mind is in   
the same state. I do not think there can   
be much pride left in you. You have been   
kicked and flogged and insulted, you have   
screamed with pain, you have rolled around  
in your own blood and vomit. You have   
whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed   
everybody and everything. Can you think of   
a single degradation that has not happened  
to you?”_

\-- George Orwell, _1984_

~*~*~

Adrian’s hands are all over Dan. At least, they may as well be.

Dan is still cuffed, although now his wrists are behind his back instead of in front of him. Adrian’s doing something very delicate here, and Dan knows Adrian can’t afford to take Dan’s compliance for granted. The cuffs strain Dan’s arms and back. When Adrian dumps the water over Dan’s face Dan’s hands itch to wipe it away from his eyes, stop where it runs off his beard and onto his chest, wetting the shirt he’s wearing, but Dan has surrendered all control.

The brush is cruel on Dan’s hair. Dan winces and groans as it tears through weeks of tangles and burrs. He looks at himself in the bathroom’s mirror. His hair is long for a man’s. It brushes against his shoulders. Adrian runs his hands through it, tries to tame it, but even with the water whorls of it refuse to lie flat. With a frustrated sigh Adrian bunches what he can at the back of Dan’s neck. Dan’s eyes flit to Adrian’s hand as it wraps around a pair of scissors.

Adrian cuts off the excess, and then snips along the side of Dan’s head until Dan’s hair is cropped close. Adrian’s fingers brush off the remaining strands. The beard is next. Dan holds still as Adrian cuts as close as possible, closes his eyes and listens to the whispering of the blade.

When he hears the hiss of the shaving cream Dan opens his eyes again. Adrian rubs the cream against his face, and the scissors are replaced with a straight razor. Dan almost inhales with … it’s not quite anticipation. Perhaps it’s what comes before anticipation, the idea that something could happen. Adrian narrows his eyes at Dan. The message is clear: No. No, it could not.

Adrian shaves him with frustrating but not unappreciated slowness. Dan’s face is unmarred when Adrian is done, and when Adrian sponges off the last of the lather he looks at Dan with satisfaction. With his body cleaned, his nails cut, his hair tamed and beard gone, Dan looks like the last month and a half of his life never happened at all.

“Now,” Adrian says, laying his hand on Dan’s shoulder, “is there anything you want?”

That has to be the stupidest, cruelest question Dan’s ever heard. Adrian knows exactly what he wants. He wants to hunch up, shake Adrian’s hand off his shoulder, but Adrian’s grip is strong, a reminder of what he can take away even as he’s offering. Dan knows this gesture very well.

“Darkness,” Dan finally says.

Adrian blinks. “Pardon?”

“Darkness. I’m tired. I want to sleep in a room with no sunlight.”

Adrian chuckles underneath his breath, untangles Dan’s hands from behind the chair. “That’s all? Well, I already know where you’ll be sleeping. It will be dark. Stand up.”

Dan does. Adrian wraps a hand around Dan’s right bicep, leads him out of the bathroom, up two flights of wide staircases and into a hallway. The hallway is painted black. Gold Ozymandias symbols are mounted along the walls, mark off the spaces between deep red wood doors and frames. A burgundy carpet leads them down the hall. It’s not at all like the white plaster of the servants’ quarters.

“Guest rooms,” Adrian says, guessing the question that Dan can’t ask.

“So I’m getting one of these?”

“No.” He doesn’t elaborate further.

The hallway ends at two wide doors colored the same deep red with matching gold Ozymandias symbols for the handles. Adrian lets go of Dan, opens the doors, and Dan feels his stomach twist.

“You first.” Adrian waves his hand toward the interior of the room like an usher.

Dan hesitates, but he steps inside.

It’s gorgeous, of course. He knew it would be; so he simply registers the large four-poster bed with a gold coverlet and purple curtains, the widescreen television installed in a bookcase opposite the bed, the delicate woodwork in the doors to what is probably the closets, or maybe a private bathroom, the columns along the walls made to look like stone, the wide windows with curtains as thick as carpets. Fuck, he thinks. He wants to tell Adrian he’s changed his mind, but Adrian closes the curtains.

The darkness is full and complete. Adrian’s shut off the sun, told Ra himself to close his eye. Dan inhales sharply, as if he’s been touched by beautiful woman. God, it’s so wonderful.

“ _This is what you whore yourself out for?_ ”

That’s not really him, Dan reminds himself. He’s dead. He’s left me here.

Yet Dan hears the rustling of fabric, and he can’t ignore the question. Dan can feel Adrian move toward him, feel the heat of his body from only a foot away.

“I can’t do that,” Dan blurts out. “Send me back to the servants’ quarters if that’s what this means. I just … I can’t …”

Adrian snorts. “Dan, please. I told you before. There’s nothing you can do for me that I can’t provide for myself. Especially that.”

Dan flinches. He doesn’t know why that stings his ego so much.

“Of course,” a hand comes out of the darkness, trails along Dan’s face, “If you ever wish for it, I could be a gracious host. I’ll be the last person you’ll ever see. It could get lonely.”

Dan can feel his face redden, inhales sharply through his nose.

Adrian removes Dan’s left hand from the cuffs, leads Dan to the bed by the empty one.

“You can undress as much as you like now,” he says.

Dan’s eyes are starting to adjust to the dark, and he wonders if Adrian can already see him. He turns his back to Adrian as he takes off the shirt and pants, squirms underneath the covers in his underpants, eager to hide himself. Adrian takes his cuffed wrist, latches the open cuff to the left post.

Adrian moves away, slides into the other side of the bed, making it rock with his weight. Dan curls up to the edge of the bed, trying to stay as far away as possible. Adrian reaches over, strokes the fine, short remnants of his hair. Dan tries to worm away, so much so that he’s nearly falling off, but Adrian just comes closer.

“You said you wouldn’t …” Dan says.

“I’m not.”

“Can’t I have my space?”

“Everything here is my space,” Adrian says.

The hand continues to rub his head, moves down to his neck. Hell and damnation, Dan thinks. Why is he doing this?

Eventually Adrian stops, moves away and back to the other side of the bed. For many agonizingly long minutes, nothing happens. Dan hears Adrian breathe with the slow regularity of sleep, and he can finally rest.

~*~*~

It’s not real, Dan tells himself. I’m only dreaming. He tries to wake up, take himself away from this, but he can’t stop it. He can’t stop himself.

He’s sitting up on Adrian’s bed, his hand still cuffed to the post. Not that it really matters. His limbs feel heavy, won’t respond to his mental commands. All he can do is stare straight ahead, stare at her.

The room is still dark but Laurie – tied up and bound to a chair – is lit up as if she’s in a spotlight. She raises her head to Dan, and he can see her mouth is gagged as well, stretching her painted lips around a red ball. She squirms in her bonds – her hands behind her back, her feet tied to the legs so that her sex is splayed open beneath the yellow gauze of her costume. He hears footsteps in the dark, and Twilight Lady walks into the light.

The scene is an echo of reality, of many years ago when Twilight Lady had offered him one of her girls. He’d thought it was a rescue mission, but when he found the girl, Twilight Lady was there, said the girl was a gift to him. It had made him furious (“I know you have other people but to get someone else involved with us …”), but also ashamed, because if he wasn’t a good person, if things were different …

I need to wake up, he tells himself. This is wrong and disrespectful and …

Twilight Lady smiles as she stands behind the chair, bends over to run her hands up and down Laurie’s body. The yellow fabric of Laurie’s costume catches on Twilight Lady’s leather-gloved fingers as they traverse Laurie’s curved hips, her firm breasts. Laurie’s eyes are shut tight; her neck leaned back and to the side. Twilight Lady licks a trail down Laurie’s neck as Laurie moans against the gag.

“ _Such a good girl._ ” Twilight Lady pinches Laurie’s right nipple. Laurie’s cry is equal parts desire and rage. “ _So well-behaved._ ”

“Stop it,” Dan pleads, every letter coming out with painful slowness, as heavy as his limbs.

“ _Oh, Nite Owl,_ ” she purrs, and his superhero name sounds like a mockery. She’s moved to Laurie’s other nipple, kneading it until it’s as hard as the other. Laurie whimpers. “ _Is this really something you want to stop?_ ”

Laurie raises her head, opens her beautiful dark eyes to look into Dan’s. She whispers his name around the gag, pleading but he’s not sure if it’s for help or for … Arousal courses through him. Oh God, no, he thinks. Wake up. Wake up!

His eyes open to darkness. He looks to the side of the bed. Adrian is still there, sleeping. Seeing him there makes Dan tense and uncomfortable but it allows him to ignore the hardness between his legs, to push away the dream.

~*~*~

The ensuing days follow the same pattern.

Dan’s day starts whenever Adrian awakens. If Adrian has work, he leaves and Dan stays in the room. He’s still cuffed, but he’s allowed to watch a movie or read a book or magazine, so long as he requests it when Adrian wakes up and doesn’t waste Adrian’s time by taking too long to think of what he wants. Sometimes Adrian comes back to bring him breakfast. It isn’t anything special – just eggs and toast and maybe some cereal. All of his meals are plain, but it’s the same as what Adrian eats. When you’ve had servants cook for you for years your own skills stagnate, Dan supposes. Still, he likes breakfast and the hours that follow. It’s the only privacy he gets during the day.

Whenever Adrian is done – this can be anywhere from three hours to eight – he uncuffs Dan. Dan gets dressed in front of Adrian, because other than showering and using the bathroom, Adrian leaves him few opportunities for modesty. He has new clothes now. He doesn’t like them: silk shirts and dress pants which somehow both belie and emphasize his low status, but they’re better than wearing the clothes of a man Dan has guessed is now dead. He also gets a new pair of eyeglasses – Adrian looked up his medical records and found his prescription. Dan wonders if he’ll even have any money if he gets out, now.

After he dresses, they do what Adrian wants.

Sometimes they work out in Adrian’s gym, which is nice after staying in bed for so long although Adrian trusts Dan with pretty much nothing. Any freeweights have been locked up, and Adrian watches everything Dan does. When it’s Adrian’s turn, Dan is cuffed to one of the machines, is expected to wait.

Sometimes they watch the news in the TV hall – Dan guesses Adrian had the walls repaired during Dan’s time in the servants’ quarters. Dan hates when they watch the news. The multiple screens give him headaches. If he tries to concentrate on just one, the sound of another will drown it out or Adrian will change the channel.

“I was watching that,” Dan protests one day after Adrian changes the station on a story about _The New Frontiersman_ recovering from a raid that occurred a month ago.

“You miss the point of this exercise,” Adrian says, his eyes still locked on the screens. “If you get mired into only one point of view, you run the risk of becoming myopic. You should consider this an opportunity to grow, Dan.”

Grow for what? Dan wonders. As if there were any benefit to learning about an outside world he’s barred from. The messages that stick the most only hurt him – memorials following Adrian’s disaster, interviews with family members of survivors and those who have had recurring nightmares or mental disorders since then, controversies over the latest joke about the massacre from comedians who went a bit too far (Sam Kinison: “Oh man, figures that when the monster from outer space comes to destroy us all it looks like a GIANT FUCKING PUSSY!”). Somehow the last one seems to anger Adrian the most, can send him into tirades worthy of Rorschach even as Adrian laces his dialogue with assurances that he believes in the freedom of speech.

Sometimes they listen to music or watch a movie together. At first, Dan thought he would like this better, but he doesn’t. Adrian likes a lot of arty, impressionistic films that don’t hold any interest for Dan. The music is even worse. Once he listened to a song that lasted more than ten minutes and seemed to consist mostly of movie sound effects and children babbling in German. (For a moment he imagines telling this story to Rorschach, “You can’t complain about the jazz anymore because there was this one time …” but then he comes back to reality.)

Then again, when Adrian tries to consider Dan’s likes it’s almost worse. For the first couple of weeks during breakfast and the hours after, Dan watches and listens to stuff Adrian picks out for him: Israeli films, Chaim Potok novels, Klezmer music. It’s not that they are all horrible, but they are not him. They are choices picked out by someone who knows he’s a Jewish man and nothing else.

For awhile, he doesn’t complain. He doesn’t know how to react to Adrian, is always caught between impotent resentment toward the man who’s imprisoned him and a wonder if keeping a distance toward the man he’ll be forced to spend the rest of his life with is only hurting himself in the end.

Still, it stops one day when Adrian brings him the film version of _The Diary of Anne Frank_. Dan watches it for the first twenty minutes shaking with rage until Adrian finally asks him what’s wrong.

“Nothing,” Dan says, poison in his voice. He turns his head away, whispers the actual words that had been on his tongue since he saw the title screen, thinks Adrian won’t hear. “You insensitive, heartless slime.”

He does anyway. Adrian’s movements are heavy, full of anger as he walks to the television to turn off the movie, stands in front of Dan.

“I’ll remind you to watch who you think to compare me to,” Adrian says. “There are far worse jailers than me in the world.”

Dan says nothing, but things do change after that. Every day Adrian asks Dan if there’s anything he wants, and if it’s reasonable it’ll appear a few days later. Dan regrets some of his choices, though. Louis Jordan’s bouncy beats and tongue-in-cheek wordplay don’t fit his new life at all. _Casablanca_ just reminds him of Laurie. He still likes Billie Holiday, though. Even if he can’t listen to “You’re My Thrill” anymore, he can still occasionally get lost in her voice.

“ _Sunday is Gloomy  
My hours are slumberless  
Dearest, the shadows I live with are numberless …_”

He tries to keep it together, tries not to show any emotion – anger or grief – around Adrian, but sometimes it slips. One day when they’re watching the news Sally Jupiter appears, says she’s been in talks with the police for a plea bargain and everything will be okay, Laurie, she swears it, if you would just come home. The video only plays a minute before the TV automatically switches its channel but it’s enough to send Dan into heaving, wrenching sobs. Midway through his crying he looks at Adrian, looks to see if this is affecting him at all. Adrian just looks at him with disinterest, as if Dan’s a specimen under a microscope, as if he’s evidence of a phenomenon Adrian can’t quite understand.

~*~*~

One day, Adrian changes the routine. He wakes up Dan, shoves a towel and a book in his hand, and then takes him to the pool room.

“You’re on your own today,” Adrian says as he shoves Dan through the door. “Use your time as you see fit.”

“Adrian, I really don’t want to stay here. It …”

Adrian closes the door, locks it behind him. Dan thinks about trying to kick it down but what would be the point? There’s never anywhere to go.

Somehow the pool room is much bigger than he remembers. Was it really this cavernous, this empty? When Laurie took his hand and asked him to sit with her, everything seemed to shrink down to her and only her. The world was too big and horrible for him to process anything else.

“ _Oh, it’s sweet,_ ” she had said. “ _Being alive is so damn sweet._ ”

You didn’t mean that, Dan thinks. You lied to me. Wasn’t I there for you when you said you needed me? I needed you, too. Didn’t that matter at all?

One day he won’t ask these questions of himself. One day they won’t hurt.

Dan sits aside the pool, lets his feet dip into the water and watches the water ripple. He looks at his reading material for the day: Plato’s _The Republic_. Dan sighs, tosses it behind him. Dan removes his pajamas – well, the pajamas Adrian has him wear, nothing is his anymore – strips naked and slides into the pool. He does some laps up and down the pool: fast, then slow. Then he lets himself float in the deep end.

He considers his body. His hair has grown back; wet strands stick to his neck. Adrian regularly shaves his face for him, and today it reflects smoothly in the water. Dan’s lost weight: a remnant of his time in the servants’ quarters maintained through exercise, but the muscular physique of his early days are far behind him, and his stomach hangs off his body like bag with half the contents missing. The water numbs his joints. They ache a lot more these days, especially his wrists, which are constantly sore from his time in handcuffs.

Still, Dan thinks. He’s healthy enough that he’ll take awhile to break down, some sort of trauma excepted.

Dan stops moving his feet, closes his eyes and feels the water cover his body. He tries not to move, tries to will himself to the bottom of the pool, not knowing how serious this is, not knowing what he’s trying to do. When Dan hits the bottom, when his lungs start to burn, he opens his eyes.

Rorschach is there.

“ _Coward,_ ” Rorschach sneers, the blots on his mask moving like fish.

Dan emerges from the water with a gasp. He coughs as he gropes for the pool ladder, slings his arm over the top stair to hold himself above the water. His heart is racing like he’s just done a sprint.

“You’re the coward,” Dan says. “You’d rather be dead than be wrong, you asshole.”

What the hell am I doing? Dan thinks. I’m talking to myself.

“ _Fine to die for nothing, then? For own misery, like Miss Juspeczyk?_ ”

Dan looks up to see Rorschach crouching on his feet near the edge of the pool, the bottom of his trenchcoat spread out over his legs and behind him like the wings of a bird.

“Christ, I really am seeing things.”

“ _On contrary, been blind,_ ” Rorschach says. “ _Answers in front of you. Been too emotional to see them._ ”

“Answers?” Dan rubs his eyes, hopes to make the vision of Rorschach go away, but he – it – stays. “Rorschach, there’s no mystery to solve here. There’s no way out. I … God damn it, can’t you just go away? You had the chance to save me.”

Rorschach inhales sharply, the blots dart over his mask in an explosion of ink. “ _So did you, Daniel._ ”

Dan can’t speak. He hears Jon’s words in his head, thinks of how he was here in this room when Rorschach was out in the snow.

He blinks and Rorschach is gone.

“No!” Dan submerges again, tries to hold his breath until he feels dizzy. He comes up hacking, retching. “Rorschach!” he cries, his limbs flailing about in the water, splashing like a child pushed into the deep end for the first time. “Rorschach, come back! I’m sorry. If I knew I wouldn’t have … I would have never …”

Dan’s words echo off the walls of the empty room. He tries to be silent, listens closely for any sound that his mind could turn and re-shape in the guise of his dead best friend. All he hears is his own breathing, the soft splashing of the water against the sides of the pool.

Answers, Dan wonders. He thinks about the word even though it’s probably bullshit, probably his mind trying to fashion hope out of nothing. To figure out answers you need questions.

Dan pulls himself up the ladder, out of the pool, the water rushing behind him as he like a sigh of relief. He grabs the towel, thinks as he dries himself off.

His first, and biggest question, the one he’s had ever since he’s been in the servants’ quarters: why is he here? It doesn’t make sense. Adrian killed so many already for the sake of his higher goal and Dan’s a threat to that goal. Dan had promised to stay silent, but that promise was most likely considered forfeit after he attacked Adrian. And Jon said Adrian isn’t naturally sadistic. Indeed, Adrian told Dan pain was just pain, not glory. Leslie would have never said anything like that. Adrian keeping him alive is a means to an end.

But what end? Adrian said he needed nothing from Dan. Not money – he has plenty of that. Not any of Dan’s tech – Adrian’s got more than Dan could ever imagine and if he wanted Dan’s he would have been more insistent about finding Archie. Not sex – he can get that whenever he wants. (Actually, maybe that’s why he’s on his own today. Maybe someone’s visiting Adrian, and Dan’s been kept far away, a skeleton in the closet. He would scream, but if they didn’t already hear him screaming for Rorschach …) There’s something else, and apparently the clues are in front of him. He still doesn’t know what they are, though.

Okay, the other question. Why did Adrian leave him alone for so long if it wasn’t just to break him? Dan knows parts of the answer to this question already: it involves Rorschach, it’s a threat to the world peace and it’s been neutralized. Rorschach’s dead, and while he was a brilliant tactical planner there’s not a whole lot he would or could have done in the way of posthumous plans. The part of Rorschach that was too tactless to be kind and respectful was also too honest to be so conniving.

So it’s nothing that huge, and not very hard to see. Since Rorschach was rarely a long range-planner it would have had to have been spur of the moment, especially since they only had the vaguest idea of what was going on until after they broke into Adrian’s office. Then Dan remembers: Rorschach asked to stop, asked to drop off mail. Okay, perhaps it’s a letter. He didn’t see Rorschach write one, but he wasn’t watching him every minute that night. Where did the letter go?

The snippet of the news report plays in Dan’s head, and then it all comes together.

Dan rubs his hair with the towel until it’s dried in a tangled mess of strands. He finds _The Republic_ again, reads and waits for Adrian to retrieve him.

He has something to find out, now. And he will.

~*~*~

“I want something, please.”

Adrian looks at Dan over his shoulder. He’s buttoning a dress shirt, getting ready to work for the day. This is what Dan always has to say, a part of Adrian’s routine.

“What is it?”

“I’d like yogurt for breakfast.”

Adrian turns back to the mirror hanging in the open bathroom door. “I don’t think I could get that for you today. Everything I would normally have for dessert has been finished. Unless you want plain.”

Dan shrugs, trying to be casual. “Plain is fine. I’m just going to add it to my cereal later.”

“Hmm,” Adrian combs his hair, still not looking like Dan. “Doesn’t sound like the type of thing you would eat.”

Dan keeps his voice steady. “You told me to try new things.”

“True. You’ve been stubbornly holding on to your preferences, however.”

Dan doesn’t reply; waits as Adrian finishes with his hair. Adrian just called him stubborn. Dan remembers his exasperation with Rorschach’s many frustrating habits, how Laurie teased him about not liking Devo. It’s bad enough that he and Adrian sleep in the same bed, do almost everything together, but now even their interactions have taken on some sick parody of a relationship.

Adrian leaves without saying a word. Dan tries to go back to sleep while he waits.

Dan thinks of how he had the dream with Laurie and Twilight Lady again this previous evening. They’ve been happening a lot lately, growing more graphic, more brutal. They echo in his ears, the sounds of leather-clad fingers squishing into Laurie’s sex, of fabric tearing, of flesh slicing, of crying and moaning and Twilight Lady whispering to Laurie, “ _Beg me for it. Beg me for it. Just admit that you want it._ ”

Maybe he’s going crazy. Given the circumstances it should be forgivable.

Adrian returns, bringing the bowls of dry cereal and yogurt on a tray with water, an apple and a folded up copy of a two-month-old _Ornithological Journal_.

“Thank you,” Dan says.

He reaches for the water with his free hand, as he drinks he looks up to see Adrian staring at, considering, him.

“What is it?” Dan asks.

Adrian seems surprised by the question. He shakes his head. “Nothing. You’re welcome. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Dan puts on his glasses and opens the newsletter, pretends to read it until Adrian’s out of the room. When he’s gone Dan reaches into the yogurt, rubs it along his cuffed wrist and hand.

He’s not sure if this will work. He’s tried to slip himself out of the cuffs before, has always gotten stuck around the joint of his thumb. Even with the yogurt it still sticks. He can feel the skin scratching, his fingers going numb. He rotates his hand, trying to look for a relatively wider point, but nothing gives. He squeezes the fingers of the cuffed hand with his free one until they hurt, trying to will them smaller.

“Come on,” Dan whispers. “Come on, Danny. If he could do this, you can too.”

He pulls hard, can feel the skin rip as his thumb is crushed against the metal. It bleeds pink and red into the yogurt, like strawberry. It’s bizarre; something so painful looks so innocuous.

Dan gets out of bed, washes off his hand in the private bathroom. As the water runs down from the gold faucets – one of many luxuries, the biggest being a bath that doubles as a hot tub, in the white-and-purple bathroom about as large as his brownstone’s guest room – the knowledge that this is the first time he’ll be alone and without Adrian knowing where he is runs over him like a delicious thrill.

Dan wraps the wound in a handtowel. He wants to escape, but he knows that’s not possible. If he just manages to get away with this, he’ll be lucky. It’s a dumb idea. A longshot even, but the sense of purpose around this mission is intoxicating.

He opens the door to the bedroom, unsure of what to do next. Should he be quiet and slow, trying to make as little noise as possible, or fast, in case Adrian’s watching the video screens? My fortune for an electrical scrambler, he thinks. My fortune for a can of spray paint. But no, he needs more: building plans, codes for the alarms, Adrian’s daily itinerary. That’s how he really works: the one with the most info, the most toys, wins. He’s considerably out of his depth.

Quick, he decides, although he keeps his steps light, won’t let them pound along the floor. Adrian’s study – the one where he does his paper-based research, it’s like the TV hall, but for newspapers and magazines – is on this floor, albeit on the other side of the building. Adrian could be there, Dan thinks. The door could be locked and he might have to break it. He knows he can’t hide his escape but hoped perhaps where he was would remain a secret and … God, this plan keeps getting worse.

Yet when he reaches the room Adrian is not there, and the door is not locked. As he walks in, he can’t prevent amazement from washing over him. While probably the ugliest room in Karnak, Adrian’s study is astounding for precisely what it contains: a morgue to rival the hugest metropolitan newspaper’s. This makes perfect sense, as it is essentially a morgue for the _all_ the metropolitan newspapers, as well as tabloids and magazines and Dan wouldn’t be surprised if there are also specialty magazines and maybe even a few local papers in there. It’s row upon row of enormous metal filing cabinets stretching up to the high ceilings, with ladders on rollers to reach the top shelves, like in a library.

He thought the files would be alphabetical by paper but they’re actually by date, all mixed together. Near the far left end of the room, near many empty shelves, he finds the shelf marked November 1985. After that the shelves continue until April 1986. Five months, he realizes. He knew that, on a certain level. Saw it in the news reports but never processed it, ignored the state of the changing world and the clues to this that Adrian had dropped all along. Dan thinks back to his time in the servants’ quarters, remembers when he had promised to savor everything he saw, every interaction with another human being. He’d broken that promise, like all his promises to God.

(Then again, Yahweh has never been the god of Karnak.)

He opens the file for the beginning of November 1985, browses through the newspapers: _The New York Gazette_ , _The Washington Ledger_ , _The Chicago Courier_ , _America Today_. The ones following the disaster are largely the same, huge typefaces with words like “Horror” and “Terror” and “Why?” matched with giant pictures. Most pictures are in grayscale and focus on the monster, because as horrible as it is, it’s better than looking at the bodies. Even _The New Frontiersman_ , the paper he was looking for, follows the same initial reaction.

Dan realizes Adrian keeps every part of the newspapers, even the fold-in ads aren’t thrown away. The newspapers are also filled with notes. One notices how the _Gazette_ ’s first paper after the event has no advertisements in its “A” section, another how the _Courier_ ’s most prominent ads are for home security systems and make-your-own radios. The death tolls are always underlined, some far above what turns out to be the official number, some below. Obituaries are circled as well.

As Dan digs deeper, Adrian circles increasingly stranger things: ads for pins depicting a cartoon, bright-green-and-blue version of the world with America’s and the U.S.S.R.’s flags crossed together, a conference on Russian literature at Yale, an interview with Gene Roddenberry announcing plans to create a new _Star Trek_ television series. Dan’s not an idiot. He can see the connections Adrian’s forming; see why his captor sees them as relevant. Still, when Dan looks at the wildly vacillating numbers that eventually even out to three million, thinks of the even more countless numbers of people who lost someone like Laurie or like Rorschach, he can’t actually understand.

He goes through two full shelves, three weeks of newspapers before he finds something. When he opens the third shelf something sounds strange. Before all he heard when he opened a drawer was just the rustling of papers, but now he hears something hard knock against the side of the shelf. He looks through, finds _The New Frontiersman_ issue for November 23, 1985. As he grabs it to pull it out, he feels a gap of space between the issue and the next paper ( _Nova Express_. Dan guesses it’s an alphabetical thing.) Dan reaches down, and his fingers touch leather.

Dan’s sharp inhalation of shock feels like it could strangle the life out of him. He pulls the journal out with the paper, lets the latter fall to the floor, his hands shaking. Dan presses the journal to his face, and it feels silly, it’s not as if this is sacred. Yet Dan inhales the scent of the leather, which is mixed with sweat and dirt, and he kisses it like a siddur that’s just touched the Torah.

Well, he and God don’t talk anymore. What does it matter? What else can possibly matter when this – this piece of his friend now disintegrated into the cold, thin air – is now solidly in his hands? Possessiveness shoots through him like arousal. He’s going to keep this. He’s going to hide it and read it every night when Adrian isn’t looking and … and …

And Dan remembers that first night, shudders at the memory of Adrian running his hand through his hair. This, too, is Adrian’s. The journal was not meant to be Dan’s, and the only reason Dan holds it in his hands now is because Adrian stole it, because Adrian made Rorschach’s journal his.

“ _Everything here is my space._ ”

Dan can’t allow himself to be upset about this. He has a mission, weak and futile as it is. He sits on the floor with the journal and the paper, picks up the paper first. He thinks he knows what’s inside, and his guess is right. When he flips through the paper the first time it lies open at the correct page. Unlike the others in the tabloid its fold naturally pops up, like it has been bent back upon itself. Dan imagines the page stuffed between Adrian’s day planners, folded inside his briefcase. Red ink circles the article. Dan reads from it, and even though there is no byline, no indication of just what this means, Dan can tell it’s from him.

“ _The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout, ‘Save us!’ … and I’ll look down, and whisper, ‘no.’_ ”

Christ, Dan thinks. Doubt gnaws at the edges of his resolve. Is this what his friend really thought of people?

 _The New Frontiersman_ only published one entry. He returns to the drawer, finds the next issue. The front page announces the office raid.

“Shit,” Dan says. He returns to the floor, picks up the journal.

Adrian has red-marked this as well, and Dan tries to assuage the boiling anger, the renewed possessiveness, in his chest by telling himself that he expected this, that it emphasizes what he already figured out. He reads the next entry, then the next.

“ _Meeting with Veidt left bad taste in mouth. He is pampered and decadent, betraying even his own shallow, liberal affectations. Possibly homosexual? Must remember to investigate further._

 __“ _Dreiberg as bad, a flabby failure who sits whimpering in his basement._ ”

Dan stops reading. He isn’t sure what hurts worse, that statement or the fact that it’s been underlined in red, accompanied by a smiley face (even the symbol of the man Adrian’s killed has been co-opted) and a note in script reading “Hello, Dan.”

Dan throws the journal down like it’s a snake. Behind him, a door creaks open.

No. No.

“Dan?” Adrian calls out, his voice benevolent and kind.

Dan looks at the mess of papers around him. He can’t hide this. He also can’t move. The words “ _flabby failure who sits whimpering in his basement_ ” echo in his mind. Why the hell did he do this? What could this have possibly accomplished? It was all a useless, impotent fantasy. That’s all it’s ever been.

“Dan, you know what’s going to happen. Come on out.”

He runs anyway, slips into the next row as he hears Adrian’s steps drawing nearer, nearer. He flattens himself against the cold, hard shelves.

“I can hear you breathing, Dan.” Adrian says. “It’s how I’ve always been able to know when you’re coming.”

Dan freezes. Even though it’s just a memory, he can taste blood running from his nose.

Adrian rounds the corner. As Dan looks at him – his golden hair perfectly coiffed, his suit tailored to follow the lean lines of his body, the calluses of his hands from hours of gymnastics softened with lotion – Dan remembers how his own body looked to him that day in the pool, how he looks now, running from Adrian in the pajamas the man gave him, a rag wrapped around his bleeding hand, and the memory of the blood tastes like defeat.

Adrian steps in front of him. “Did you enjoy your little rebellion, Dan?”

Dan suddenly can’t look at Adrian, stares at the ground. “How did you know?”

“You think I didn’t notice all those sudden behavior changes after that day in the pool? I know people, Dan. I know how they act, while you barely know yourself.”

Dan raises his head, his face twisted into a scowl. “Bullshit.”

Adrian straightens, as if suddenly slapped, and Dan feels a bit pleased.

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t know anything about people,” Dan continues, anger fueling his words. As he speaks them the sting of his blighted mission hurts less. “I read your notes on those papers. It’s all statistics and names and societal trends but it’s never about people. It’s never about anybody’s pain. Hell, I didn’t even need the notes to figure that out. I should have seen it by the fucked up way you watch TV. Do you really think that makes you a better person? Do you think that erases what you did?”

Adrian’s golden brows furrow, and his blue eyes are suddenly dark. “I don’t seek erasure for what I’ve done, Dan.”

“Of course not. You’re too proud of it.”

The slap stings, but Dan won’t let his gaze waver.

“You don’t know them,” Dan continues. “And you, with your Holocaust movies and your klezmer music, do you really think you know me? Did you really think you were making some superhuman insights into my character? Christ, did you expect me to speak Yiddish and sing songs from _Fiddler on the Roof_ , too?”

Adrian’s face is red. “You forget your place, Dan.”

“Forget my place? You handcuff me to the bed every night. Do you really think I can forget?”

Adrian doesn’t answer.

“I figured out what happened to your servants,” Dan says. He stands up straighter now. “They were from Vietnam, weren’t they? Men with no country after the war. They couldn’t leave either.”

“They weren’t –”

“Did you gild what you thought was a pretty cage for them, too? Dress their rooms in Asian wall hangings to go with the food? Did you ask what they wanted or were they just happy to take it? Did you make them really comfortable before you killed them, Adrian?”

Dan can see the anger fade from Adrian’s face; see discomfort in its stead.

“You look worse now than you ever did watching television, Adrian,” Dan says. “And I bet even they didn’t matter as much to you as your cat.”

Adrian glares again. The moment after Dan realizes his mistake, Adrian’s hand knocks hard against his chest, presses him to the metal shelves.

Adrian speaks, his voice deep with rage. “You think you have an advanced morality, Dan? What would you be doing if you were free? Destroying the peace I worked years to secure while you wasted your life watching birds and pining over your glory days with your best friend and desperately hoping Laurie would leave the most powerful man in the world for you? And if she were alive, what would you be doing besides hiding from the world beneath the folds of her dress?”

The words feel like a slug to the stomach, are emphasized with another hard shove against the drawers. Dan can’t speak.

“Your whole life has been based on selfishness, Dan. You’re a rich little brat who used the millions you never earned to beat up poor street criminals so you could feel better when you looked in the mirror. And you think I miss Bubastis the most, but you too only mourn your own friends. ‘ _Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life/And thou no breath at all?_ ’ you cry, even though many, many, many besides your friends are dead. But you don’t care about them, do you? You think it means you have a heart when you turn away from their faces on the screens, think it means you can’t take in their pain. But you really can’t do that because you filter their suffering through your own misery. You make every bit of their pain and sorrow about you yet you call me the selfish one.”

“It’s … That’s not true. And I didn’t kill those people,” Dan cries, although his voice comes out higher, more desperate, than he hoped.

“True. And isn’t it nice to latch onto that?” Adrian takes a step closer, runs his free hand through Dan’s hair. “If you look at the worst parts of me it allows you to ignore the worst parts of yourself.”

Dan tries to stop himself from shaking. Adrian’s fingers entwine around the strands, the heat of his hand feels like a comfort on his cheek and somewhere in the animal, lustful part of his mind, Dan realizes it’s been months since he and Laurie made love.

“Perhaps I misspoke. There are parts of you I do not understand. Other parts, though, I think I understand very well.”

Adrian runs his hand down the left side of Dan’s face. Dan closes his eyes, but it only makes him feel it all the more.

“I read his journal, as you know,” Adrian says, and his hand is moving to Dan’s neck, to his chest. “When I read all the nasty things he said about you, I wondered for a long time why the two of you were friends at all. True, he wrote those entries very late in life, long after your partnership had ended. But what did a hateful, conservative anti-semite offer you to begin with? You were a superhero for two years before his career began, so it wasn’t experience. Rumor had it he was a good detective, but surely you could have caught up if you’d tried. He was a good fighter, but what is that to a man who installs rocket launchers in his ship?”

“He was a friend,” Dan growls the words through his teeth, wishes Adrian would stop touching him.

“But why?” Adrian draws out the second word, moves his hand back to Dan’s hair. “What could the two of you possibly have in common? Superheroing, sure. But on paper I think someone like me would have had much more to talk about with you, would have been a much better fit.”

Dan keeps trying futilely to dodge Adrian’s hand. What the fuck is Adrian doing? Why would he say something like that? Dan pushes the hand away.

“Too bad you spent most of your social time with us preparing to stab Jon in the back,” Dan spits.

“Says the man who fucked his girlfriend.”

That shuts Dan up. His heart beats hard in his chest as Adrian’s hand returns, descends down his body once more.

“It was actually thinking of her that helped me figure it out. The woman did nothing for nine years after the Keene Act. I met with her on numerous occasions during that time, saw the resentment that boiled underneath her happy, good-little-human-pet façade. Trained for a profession that existed no longer, trapped in a job better fit for her predecessor, increasingly ignored by her lover … I don’t know, Dan. You probably would have only had to ask, wouldn’t you? You probably always wanted to, didn’t you? But you never did. I bet you never asked any woman. I bet anytime you’ve ever had sex it was her idea, wasn’t it?”

Adrian’s hand is on his waist. His fingers curl around the band of the pants, and then his other hand joins them there.

“Why not, Dan? Could it be the great and powerful Nite Owl can’t do something as simple as ask a woman to fuck him? Could it be that he’s scared?” Adrian yanks hard, pulls Dan close to him so that the two of them are pushed together, wraps his hands around his hips.

“Stop it!” Dan yells.

“No.”

Adrian pushes Dan back against the shelves again. This time Adrian allows no space between them, presses his body close and looks Dan dead in the eyes.

“He was scared too, wasn’t he? All that talk of whores and fornication. The way he dwells over it, the way he speculates on Sally Jupiter, his landlady, the sex workers he meets on the street.” Adrian runs his hands over Dan’s hips, massaging them. “So where does all that repression go, Dan? You must have felt it, too.”

Dan shakes his head. “We never …”

“Oh, of course,” Adrian says, and his voice sounds like a purring cat. “And wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t Rorschach so eager to play into your fantasies of the brave knights fighting for the beautiful princesses? Only he would never touch those scary young women, would never make you feel like the inferior little beta male who couldn’t get laid because of it. But he was scared of men, too, wasn’t he?”

Dan’s teeth chatter. Adrian’s body is warm but Dan feels so cold all he can think about is the wind and snow outside. This isn’t true. None of this true. Because it can’t be true. And yet … and yet …

“Do you know what you loved the most about him, Dan? Do you know what you saw when you looked in his mask?” Adrian leans low, whispers in Dan’s ear. “Yourself. Powerful, noble, brave. He gave you the admiration, the image of yourself that you always wanted. You got a man who would love you but would never ask for sex, never ask for anything that would ruin that beautiful image of yourself as the heroic, heterosexual knight. He’d never force you to admit what you really want, what you really are.”

Dan wants to scream, to hit Adrian again and again until his beautiful face is puffed and bloodied. He wants to cry out in refusal but it dies on his lips, and he’s crying, crying in heaving sobs that he can’t stop.

Adrian steps away and Dan slides down the floor, buries his face in his hands. He can feel Adrian looking down at him, can feel his captor’s triumph. He doesn’t want to admit this, has never told this to anybody and doesn’t want Adrian to be the only person to know even now, but the words come unbidden to his lips, and he looks up at Adrian through his tears.

“You’re wrong,” Dan says. “I wanted him to ask.”

Dan waits, although for what, he doesn’t know. After a while Adrian extends his hand. Dan takes it, allows himself to be pulled up to his feet.

When the kiss comes, Dan realizes that he’ll never be cuffed again. Adrian won’t need to do that anymore.

“My,” Adrian says as he breaks the kiss. “You’re even more pathetic than I imagined.”

~*~*~

When Dan dreams that night it’s of the two of them – those beautiful, violent, powerful women, the ones who asked for him – deep in the embrace of one another. Laurie rests her head on Leslie’s lap, and Leslie strokes her hair as she cries.

“ _I need you_ ,” Laurie whispers. “ _God help me, I need you._ ”

From somewhere else in his head, he’s not sure where, he can hear Rorschach screaming.

End Part Two.


	3. Chapter 3

_“O stared at them with eyes that,  
beneath her plumage, were darkened  
with bister, eyes opened wide like the  
eyes of the nocturnal bird she was  
impersonating, and the illusion was so  
extraordinary that no one thought of  
questioning her, which would have been  
the most natural thing to do, as though she  
were a real owl, deaf to human language,  
and dumb.”_

\-- Pauline Réage, _Story of O_

~*~*~

Dan hears the news in fragments.

“ – holding the service this week. I held out the hope that she was just on the run, but at this point … Ugggh, I’m sorry … “

“ – didn’t have a good relationship sometimes, but I hope she knew I always loved her.” A gasping sob. “Oh Jesus. She was the last person I did love. All of my friends are –”

“ – keep saying that the world’s okay now because there’s no war. Well, it still feels like goddamned Armageddon from where I’m sitting. Please no more ques –”

Dan feels Adrian looking at him from his chair in front of the TV screens. He responds with an expression as hard and as unreadable as a stone. Dan always looks like this, now.

“ _Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life?_ ” Dan asks. His voice is a drone, echoes out of somewhere very hollow and very empty.

Adrian sighs with disappointment, crosses his arms.

Dan still doesn’t know what Adrian wants, although these days Dan’s not sure it matters.

~*~*~

There are no cuffs anymore. There is no routine. So long as he stays out of certain rooms, Dan can go wherever he wants.

Dan wants very little these days, but it’s nice to be out of the bed. He spends most of his days in Adrian’s nicer library – the one with ceiling-to-floor bookcases and globe, the one that would look like the study of a pulp gentleman explorer, (Doc Savage with his base in the snow …) if it weren’t for the purple curtains and gold insignia decorating the shelves. Dan spends most of his time looking out at the hated sunlight, looking out at the white and deadly expanse of snow.

He does not wish to fly above it anymore.

Thoughts of escape, thoughts of rescue, thoughts of revenge, do not tempt him. One day, when he is bored and hungry, he finds a kitchen, cooks spaghetti and tomato sauce. Adrian finds him when it’s done – Adrian usually comes to see him throughout the day – and asks if he can have some. (“Everything here is yours,” Dan says.) It is only hours later that it occurs to Dan that he could have poisoned it. Or taken a knife and slit Adrian’s throat. Or thrown the boiling water in his face. He does not feel regret that he didn’t.

Adrian’s attitude toward him has changed. He asks Dan a lot of questions now: about himself, his family, his childhood, his time at Harvard, even about the ornithological society. It’s an acknowledgement that Adrian knows nothing about him. A few months ago Dan would have felt certain measure of sick pride to instill this rare moment of insecurity and tacit admittance of a mistake. Yet Dan has no interest in that anymore. So he just tells Adrian everything he wants to know, tells Adrian the secret parts of his inner life with no tenderness, no sadness, no nostalgia for those old times. He tells these stories to prove that they no longer matter, can be torn from him like strips of flesh under a beak and claw yet it will have no affect at all.

They fuck now, as well.

Dan starts it every time. Adrian closes the drapes, brings on the night, and as Adrian gets into bed, Dan leans into his side. When Adrian turns Dan on his back or on his stomach Dan feels relief. It’s degrading, it usually hurts and he hates it, (he rarely gets hard, almost never comes) but at least it’s real, it’s no longer a threat Adrian can hold over him by running a hand against Dan’s back, through Dan’s hair.

He’s given up everything, so now Adrian can’t take anything else.

~*~*~

Dan doesn’t dream of Laurie as much anymore.

The one time he does he finds her in Twilight Lady’s boudoir, wrapped between Twilight Lady’s legs. Her entire body is encased in a black latex suit. Her face is masked. Her limbs are tied together. Yet Dan can tell it’s her. For a moment the instinct to take Laurie in his arms, stroke her through her bonds and tell her it will all be all right, hits him so hard that if he were awake he might forget to breathe. Yet he is asleep, and she is dead. She still left him.

“ _Do you want to talk to her?_ ” Twilight Lady asks. She opens the zippers over Laurie’s mouth and eyes. Then Twilight Lady turns Laurie’s face to look at Dan, tender in her total control.

Laurie looks at him, and for a moment Dan wonders if his mind has already forgotten too much of what she looked like. Her eyes were so expressive: bright and large looking over Archie, thin and fiery in battle against the Top Knots, glassy and deep as she took off his goggles and mourned the end of the world. Now they show nothing. They do not look like Laurie’s, and yet they are so familiar.

“ _Dan?_ ” Her voice is barely a whisper, but raspy. Dan blames it on her smoker’s cough and is glad he hasn’t forgotten everything. “ _Is that you, really?_ ”

“Laurie …,” he kneels down to be at her level. “Are you okay?”

Her eyes close. “ _Dan …_ ”

“I mean, we can do this, right? It won’t … This is it, isn’t it?”

She turns her head away from him. She won’t answer. Twilight Lady pulls the zippers closed.

~*~*~

When Dan wakes up, he reaches for Adrian again. He forgets.

~*~*~

It’s a week later and Dan is bent double underneath Adrian. He lays the left side of his face flat against the pillow and closes his eyes even though it’s so dark he wouldn’t see anything if he looked straight ahead. Yet it seems that’s not enough for Adrian. Dan follows the guidance of Adrian’s hand as it cups under his chin, forces his head straight for Adrian’s lips to meet his. Dan doesn’t hesitate when his mouth is opened, kisses back the way he is meant to.

Adrian sighs against his mouth. “I wish you would …”

The missing end of the sentence floats in the air, unsaid, then abandoned as Adrian takes up his rhythm again. Dan returns his head to its former position as he’s pushed against the mattress.

“Don’t you ever want to do this?” Adrian asks. His question is emphasized with the thrusting of his hips.

“No,” Dan responds.

Adrian reaches between them, rubs Dan’s prick like he’s coaxing an animal out of hiding. He gets it about halfway there.

“I’d like it,” Adrian says.

It’s not an order but it is.

Dan pushes himself up as Adrian moves off him, reaches away from him, presumably for the bottle of lube on the nightstand. Dan hears the pop as it opens. Then he feels the liquid – cool, then warm – as it’s slathered on him.

He hopes Adrian will turn on his stomach, but he doesn’t. Adrian’s legs hook around him, and Dan concentrates, tries to force his body to do what it doesn’t want to as he gropes in the dark for Adrian’s entrance. When Dan finds it he strokes himself, keeps doing so as he tries to push himself inside.

It’s not working. His wet, half-soft cock slips against the curve of Adrian’s ass, and as Dan tries again, his face burning, he comforts himself with the thought of Adrian slapping him in the face, calling him pathetic, because then it means this’ll all be over, thank God, over.

Instead Adrian adjusts the angle, whispers encouragements and strokes his hands along Dan’s back. But after what feels like a forever of failed attempts Adrian finally says it’s all right. Dan drops to the bed, hides himself up to the neck under the covers.

This doesn’t hurt, he thinks. This doesn’t hurt. He repeats that phrase in his head like a mantra, hopes it’ll get him to sleep.

Then Adrian is close against him, reaches underneath the covers, runs his hand down from Dan’s neck to his stomach.

“It’s fine, Daniel,” Adrian says.

“Daniel?” Dan repeats, although his name – the name _he_ used – is so quiet it barely escapes his mouth.

Adrian releases him, curls back on his side of the bed. Dan feels his entire body tense and shake like it’s been hit by an electroshock. This doesn’t hurt, he thinks. This doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t matter. It’s just his name. It doesn’t mean anything to him. It …

Oh God … His eyes sting. A scream dies as a pained squeak in his throat. No. No, stop it. Stop it, you idiot. Whiny little schoolboy. Stupid failure of a superhero who can’t even save himself. Can’t please your father. Can’t talk to a girl. Can’t even stop her from dying. Can’t do anything. Whimpering in the basement, you flabby fail—

A leather-clad finger presses against his lips, silencing him, before he can complete the thought.

Fuck, Dan thinks. He can’t take this. It’s not real and he can’t have this anymore. Never got to have it and why the fuck does he keep imagining …?

The finger is gone. Arms slide underneath his shoulder blades, lift him up off the bed and wrap him in muscle and gabardine. The embrace is warm and all-encompassing, something Dan could stay in forever. He’s only ever felt like this once before. He smells nostalgia as he wraps his arms around the neck of the man who isn’t there, locks himself into this small, safe world. He feels like he could die now. Oh God, he wants to. Nothing will ever feel this good again.

“ _Don’t be stupid. Not dying yet._ ” Rorschach’s arms slip away from his, although he can still feel the presence of the man over him, the way he can always feel where Adrian is in the darkened rooms. “ _Hurm. Owls can see in the dark. Of course, never received true darkness. Asked for it. Instead, Veidt gave you a hood._ ”

The leather presses against Dan’s eyes now, as if wiping off tears. When Dan opens them, white and black beneath a fedora stares down at him. Dan can’t see anything else in the room, but _he_ is there, and …

“Am I going insane?” Dan asks. “God, can I go insane? Just cut myself off from the world and stay with you? I don’t care. I don’t care if you’re not real. I just can’t do this anymore.”

“ _Told you not to be stupid._ ” The blots move upward in whorls over Rorschach’s face, remind Dan of a burning fire. “ _But you’re right. Can’t do this anymore._ ”

A tendril of doubt curls around Dan’s heart. He pushes it away, clasps his hands on Rorschach’s shoulders. “Listen. I never told you this, but I want to say to you that I always l—”

“ _No._ ” The fire bursts like a log’s been thrown on it. “ _Not here for that. Not what you need. Gave you a mission, Daniel._ ”

Dan flinches at his name, his name that’s been sullied. (Just like the rest of him, he supposes.) “God, man. I don’t give a shit why I’m here. Figuring these things out hasn’t helped me. It’s just made things worse.” He glares at Rorschach. “Just made me more of the flabby failure you always thought I was, apparently.”

Rorschach growls low in his throat. “ _Chided me for giving up. What have you been doing?_ ”

“But I can’t do anything else!” He’s yelling now, desperate, isn’t sure why he hasn’t woken Adrian up. “I can’t!”

The mask shifts again, blots moving quickly this time, shifting like bodies crashing into each other, obliterating before reforming and dying again. Another tendril of doubt.

“ _Staring at my face,_ ” Rorschach removes his fedora, crumples it in his hand. “ _Want me, Daniel? Want my world? Take it off._ ”

Suddenly the doubt turns to dread. “What?” Dan asks.

“ _Do it._ ”

Dan reaches out to Rorschach, his hands shaking. It’s a dream, and he’s not sure what he’ll see when he removes the mask. Nothing? A monster? The cold, dead eyes and white pallor of a corpse?

Dan edges his thumbs beneath the mask, peels it up and off. He looks.

It’s just Rorschach’s face.

His other face: the one with the red hair, the ears that stick out, the freckles. But more than that: the mouth that rarely smiles, the purpled bruises of a man who wears his tolerance for pain like a badge of pride, the eyes that take in everything and reveal nothing.

The visions come upon Dan suddenly. Reflections. Himself in the mirror after he wakes up in the morning. In the window of the library as he looks out onto the frozen horizon. In Adrian’s crooning and touches returned with icy, resentful, indifference.

_Nothing. A monster. The cold, dead eyes and white pallor of a corpse. If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into …_

“No,” Dan moans. “No. No, it’s not true. I’m not … I can’t … I can’t be that way. I can’t.”

“ _Daniel …_ ” Rorschach warns. His expression does not change. “ _Already are._ ”

Dan throws himself upright as he wakes, panting and sweating in the dark. He doesn’t know what time it is, although he can hear Adrian breathe next to him. He curls up and shivers hard beneath the covers, unable to move until he feels Adrian stir.

~*~*~

The next day finds Dan in the library, back at his perch next to the window, a Billie Holliday vinyl on the record player.

“ _Gloomy is Sunday, with shadows I spend it all  
My heart and I have decided to end it all_.”

He’s not sure how many hours he’s been there, but it must be awhile, because Adrian complains when he enters.

“You’ve listened to that record five times in a row.”

“Sorry,” Dan says. He won’t look at Adrian. He usually doesn’t, anyway, but he’s hoping emotional distance based on disconnection looks the same as emotional distance based on fear.

The record needle scratches as Adrian removes it. Dan hears the soft squeak of vinyl entering paperboard, the clunk as a large swath of Adrian’s collection is pushed to the side so Adrian can retrieve another record.

“Dan?”

“What?”

“Look at me. Do you like this?”

Dan cranes his head as far as it can go. Adrian’s almost in back of him, next to the shelves of records, holding one out in front of him. Dan squints from behind the glasses he’s wearing, sees the profile of Etta James on the cover.

“Yeah, I like it,” Dan says. I used to own it, he thinks.

Adrian puts it on. After a few minutes of white, whirring noise, the opening horns of “I Just Want to Make Love to You” play.

Adrian turns it low, moves to Dan’s side. “Do you want to talk about last night?”

Is he kidding? “Not particularly,” Dan says. “Unless there’s something you want to tell me.”

Adrian’s hand rests on Dan’s head, strokes through his hair. The intimacy still bothers Dan, even though he’s used to it by now. “I just want to know if I can make anything better for you.”

Nothing you’re willing to do, Dan thinks. Dan reaches for Adrian’s belt, tries to unbuckle it with one hand. Maybe this will shut him up.

Adrian grasps Dan’s wrist, stops it. “Dan …”

“You don’t need this from me, right?” Dan’s eyes turn upward to Adrian for the first time. “Isn’t that what you said?”

Adrian inhales, opens his mouth then closes it again. He lets go of Dan’s hand. Dan returns his gaze to the outside.

“You keep looking at the sun,” Adrian says. “I thought you hated it.”

“I do.” Dan shrugs.

“You may miss it. Winter is coming shortly. It’ll be dark all the time, then.”

Dan makes a humming noise, something that sounds like yes, and whispers, not sure if he wants Adrian to hear or not, “Well, I’m Nite Owl, after all.”

Adrian does hear, and laughs. “Really, Dan? You actually still think of yourself that way?” He laughs again. “That’s not even your name, Dan. You took it from Hollis.”

“Hollis?” Dan repeats the name like he’s never heard it before. He feels his heart tighten. It’s been so long since he thought of Hollis.

“Well,” Adrian pats his shoulder. “I’ll leave you alone. Come join me in the dining hall in an hour, Dan.”

He leaves. Dan brings his knees to his chest, hugs them, suddenly disturbed.

The song on the record changes. “ _At last/My love has come along/My lonely days are over/And life is like a song._ ”

Dan flies from the window, yanks the needle away. His body shakes as he squeezes it in his fist. He thinks of Hollis and he slumps to his knees, presses his forehead against the legs of the table and stays there until the hour passes.

~*~*~

Dan doesn’t ask that night, lies awake as Adrian slumbers. Sleep doesn’t come easy, but somehow dreams do.

~*~*~

Like Twilight Lady and Laurie, this scene is also an echo of reality.

Dan stands on a strip of reddish sand next to the water: large, clear, blue, surrounded by trees green and full in the late spring day. There are no clouds in the sky, and the sun – which now seems to bear no resemblance to Ra – creates a thousand speckled lights on the surface of the water. Then those lights are shattered and dissipated as a bark rings out and a white dog rushes into the water, loud churning and splashing following in his wake.

Dan can’t bring himself to look at the man beside him.

“ _It’s a lovely little place, Dan,_ ” Hollis says. “ _Have you been here before?_ ”

Dan nods. “It’s a reservoir in New Jersey. My father used to walk with me here when I was a kid.”

“ _Well, I’m glad you’re sharing with me. I was worried you really did want to forget everything._ ”

Phantom II barks again, splashes toward the sand and shakes the water off like he’s a whirling piece of an engine. Dan watches as he runs to his master, as Hollis – and Dan can see him now, thin and wrinkled and smiling – kneels to pet Phantom II.

There has been so much Dan never fully appreciated, never fully learned. It hurts.

“Tell me a way out of this.”

Hollis removes the cigarette from his mouth, and there is no smile on his face anymore. “ _Danny?_ ”

“Please. There has to be a better way, doesn’t there?” Even in his dreams, Dan won’t say the words he’s really thinking, won’t make an appeal to the stories of the brave knights who always slay the dragons, who always rescue the maidens. He hears Adrian calling him a child, and he already knows the answer.

In the same fashion, Hollis knows exactly what he’s thinking.

“ _Dan, you’re better at book-learning than I ever was, but … that_ Beowulf _guy. In the end, the dragon kills him, doesn’t he?_ ”

“The dragon still dies.”

Phantom II whines, nuzzles his master’s face. Hollis runs a hand along his back. “ _I wouldn’t know anything about that._ ”

Dan covers his mouth with his fist, bites down on the gasp that wants to come out. The sky is suddenly no longer bright.

“ _He’s coming for you,_ ” Hollis says as the shadows grow long around them. “ _I’m sorry … things have changed so much since I was young. I never …_ ” and Hollis and Phantom II begin to shimmer like the water, to fade, “ _I never thought it would turn out this way …_ ”

Hollis is gone before Dan can protest. He looks around. The shadows have turned into stormclouds and the wind is picking up, causing the water to smash in waves against the sand. The high-pitched trilling of a screech owl rings in his ears (Eastern, _megascops asio_ , probably female), and he feels the urge to run.

The woods are like those of his childhood, too: shade-darkened pathways crossed with the roots of old trees. Dan trips over the roots multiple times as he runs. Dan can’t see his pursuer, but can hear the footfalls behind him, steady and inexorable. Not that he needs to hear, he can feel what’s coming like a chill.

The last time Dan trips he can’t save himself and tumbles forward, flat on his stomach. When he looks up, he is no longer in the forest.

It’s his city, or what was his city. In black and white, like the newspaper photos, the monster lies in front of him. Blood drips from its numerous pores like streaks of ink.

He’s not afraid of this monster – this huge, fascinating and horrible thing which cannot hurt him – but his eyes move down below it, and then he is scared.

The bodies are not like the bodies that Laurie must have seen, in the harshness of reality where carnage is belied by spilled rice. The corpses his mind conjures come from a jumble of television images: photos from Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam. Mounds of bodies, naked and bleeding. Based on a truth but not. A lie but no less horrible.

The blood leaches from the bodies and flows toward him. ( _“The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood …”_ ) He looks toward the rooftops, reaches toward his belt instinctively for tools that aren’t there. Then he runs to the right, down an alley where corpses lean against the alleyway walls like strung-out junkies. The ladder of a fire escape hangs down from one of the buildings and Dan jumps up, catches the lowest rung. He uses all the strength in his arms to climb up to the second rung, the third.

He feels a strong grip around his right ankle. It yanks down hard.

“No!” Dan yells, kicking his legs, struggling to keep his hold. “Stop! Leave me alone!”

“ _Want to run from them? Abandon them?_ ”

Dan turns his chin down, glares into the harsh, freckled face that looks back up at him. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

“ _Not like this._ ”

Dan kicks hard and Rorschach’s hand slips away. He pulls himself up the ladder again, reaches the top of the building.

Twilight Lady is waiting there, a leash in her hand, the black, glistening form of what was once Laurie curled at her feet.

“Oh, God. Not again.”

Twilight Lady smiles. “ _But why wouldn’t I be here, Nite Owl? There’s always an affinity between sex and death. I’m sure you and my pet know this from experience._ ”

Dan shudders, and Twilight Lady reaches down, strokes the latex over Laurie’s head in circles. “ _And you’re so devoted, aren’t you, dear?_ ”

“ _I need you,_ ” Laurie moans.

“ _Mmmm hmmm,_ ” Twilight Lady says, her hands still circling. “ _And you’ll let me do anything to you because you need me. I can beat you, flay you open, break you and remake you in any image I want and you’ll let me because you need me that much, won’t you? You’ll let me do it because you love, you love so much …_ ”

A sob comes, muffled, from behind the mask. “ _Yes …_ ”

“No!” Dan protests. He tries to move toward them, split them apart, but even though his wrist isn’t cuffed his limbs are heavy again, won’t move. “No, that isn’t love. I don’t … I don’t love him.”

“ _Of course not,_ ” Twilight Lady agrees, although she’s looking at Laurie, turns her hooded face upward and kisses her. “ _But Adrian isn’t the one who’s really hurting you, is he? Just like it’s never been me who’s hurting Laurie. After all, I’m not the one who has any reason to punish her._ ”

Twilight Lady slaps Laurie hard across the face, and Dan flinches. Twilight Lady laughs, stands up and throws Laurie down. She digs a boot into Laurie’s back as she pulls on Laurie’s leash, making Laurie scream.

“ _Want me to beat her again for you, Dan? Want me to ask the cowardly little bitch why she left you?_ ”

Laurie screams out his name, and the ground beneath Dan collapses.

The fall is so sudden and fast Dan is shocked he doesn’t wake up from the force of it. He lies flat, back-down, against the ground, and when he gets up steel bars encircle him.

Sing-sing, Dan realizes. He scrambles to the walls of the cell, grabs onto the bars to shake them like a cliché because he has no idea what to do now. When Dan grips onto them, other hands cover his.

“ _Can’t hide now._ ”

Dan tries to pull away but Rorschach’s hands are too strong. Rorschach steps into the light. He’s wearing his prison clothes, and Dan feels his heart stop – not sure if it’s the fear or something else that’s doing it – when he sees Rorschach’s eyes.

“I can’t do it.”

“ _Coward,_ ” Rorschach sneers, digs his nails into the back of Dan’s hands. “ _Flabby failure._ ”

Dan cries in pain. “I don’t want this. I don’t want to be like you. You leave people. You die!”

“ _Think I wanted it?_ ” Rorschach asks, leans toward Dan so close his face nearly touches the bars. “ _Think I wanted to find that girl? Think I wanted to become this way?_ ”

“There’s … there’s always a choice.” Dan says, although the words come out weak, soft. This is always been about how there’s never been a choice. “Why should I?” Dan moans. “It won’t bring you or Laurie or Hollis or any of them back. And I’ll just die or be captured and Adrian will be remembered as a martyr and a hero. There’s no point, man. It’s all just needless, selfish sacrifice.”

Rorschach’s eyes are like a hawk, or a crow. He tilts his head, considers Dan.

Then he lets go of Dan’s hands, reaches a muscular arm through the bars and around Dan’s shoulders, stroking his neck. His touch is like flame.

“ _Say it’s selfish. But nothing to be gained from it. If nothing to gain, can’t be selfish._ ”

Dan can’t speak, doesn’t even know what to say, what to think.

He’s lost.

Rorschach steps closer. The bars disappear. He’s in his costume again, close, so close to Dan, and the flame feels more like a forest fire.

“Oh God,” Dan moans and presses against Rorschach.

They tumble to the floor, hands moving as if to take in all of each other at once. Palms stroke against faces. Lips touch. Hips buck. Dan wants to sob with the relief of it. It’s not real. It doesn’t even feel real. There’s no solidity, no pain, no embarrassment. It’s just the half-remembered sensation of a body moving against another, of losing oneself in another person. Dan is intertwined with Rorschach. He remembers what Twilight Lady said earlier, and without regret he understands.

“ _Pity_ ,” Rorschach growls, thrusting against Dan. “ _Pity this is what you respect._ ”

Dan ignores him. He whines low in the back of his throat, presses his fingers against Rorschach’s mask. “Give it to me,” he breathes.

Rorschach growls with something between lust and anger. “ _Thought you weren’t like me._ ”

“Please …” Dan runs his hand up and down the mask, black ink trailing his movements, and he hates himself.

The black ink oozes from the mask onto Dan’s fingertips, moves down his hands, his arms. Dan is afraid – it burns all the way down – but he keeps his hold on the mask as Rorschach keeps fucking him, as the ink continues to move over his body. Oh God, it hurts: hurts like memory, hurts like his name. Yet he kisses Rorschach anyway, lets the poison touch his lips, sear his face. When it covers him entirely, he convulses, and he isn’t sure if it’s an orgasm or a death throe.

When he opens his eyes, Rorschach is coated in the green haze of his goggles.

He’s wearing his whole Nite Owl costume, now. It clings to him like a lover. It’s one with his skin. No, he corrects himself, it is his skin. He runs his hands up and down his body, up and down his face. “Mine,” he whispers. He hasn’t been able to use that word in so long. This is his. This is all he wants.

This is all he needs.

“ _Da –_ ” Rorschach says, then stops, corrects himself. “ _Nite Owl._ ”

Nite Owl looks at him, his heart hardened to any sort of affection or regret, and for a moment he sees the inkblots move down Rorschach’s face in streaks, almost like tears.

“ _I’m sorry_ ,” Rorschach whispers.

~*~*~

“I want something,” Nite Owl says to Adrian the next evening.

Adrian can tell the request is suspicious, so Nite Owl has to negotiate, tells Adrian he doesn’t need the belt, wants the goggles but doesn’t really need them either. Their time together will be better, much better, if he has it.

Eventually Adrian agrees, brings out Nite Owl’s bodysuit, cowl, and goggles (skin, feathers, eyes) before they sleep. He gives Nite Owl some time alone to put them on, and when he returns, he is Ozymandias.

Nite Owl didn’t ask for that, but he doesn’t mind.

The sex is much better with it. Nite Owl can stay hard now, can fuck Adrian when he asks for it. He turns on the goggles and watches the movement of Adrian’s neck as he gasps for air, runs his hands down his chest and feels the beating of his heart. It all feels so temporary, so fragile.

And Nite Owl feels very strong, back in his skin. Laurie’s earring was still in one of the gloves, he keeps it there during this, and that makes him strong, too.

Yet Nite Owl doesn’t do anything to Ozymandias that night. The last time he failed, he made his move after doing something suspicious. This will take a few nights, Nite Owl thinks.

It does, and while Nite Owl watches closely for Adrian’s suspicious looks to dissipate, for Adrian to get used to this new status quo, he only once allows himself to consider – briefly – the coldness of this act. Then he closes his eyes, and sees Hiroshima.

~*~*~

Nite Owl has another dream about Laurie.

She stands up with jerky, restricted movements in her black latex suit, releases her limbs from her body with a frustrated growl and a tearing of fabric. When they’re free she brings her hands to the crown of her head, rips off the suit to reveal the Silk Spectre hiding inside.

The yellow and black colors of her costume make her look like a tiger as she pounces for The Twilight Lady, as her nails dig into The Twilight Lady’s face and scratch at her eyes, as she bites down onto Twilight Lady’s throat and pulls.

Nite Owl feels no regrets.

It’s time.

~*~*~

Nite Owl lies underneath Adrian this time. He’s tense, and the movements of his captor cause far too much pain to ever be considered enjoyable but Nite Owl’s attentive. His tongue is pressed down Adrian’s mouth, licking at Adrian’s tongue and sucking on Adrian’s lips. It’s distracting enough that Adrian continues kissing him when Nite Owl grasps the edges of Adrian’s long, purple cape, wraps them around his fingers as he strokes up and down Adrian’s back. He is calm. He can do this. This is what they both deserve.

Nite Owl breaks the kiss and knocks his head against Adrian, hard enough that he can feel Adrian’s nose break. As Adrian stumbles back, falls away from Nite Owl, Nite Owl dives for him, the cape still gripped in his hands. He crosses his arms over Adrian’s neck, attempting to strangle him, but Adrian already has his hands raised, catches the fabric before it can wrap around his neck.

Through the green haze, Adrian’s face is somewhere between panic and anger. Adrian didn’t expect this, and a sick part of Nite Owl delights at the thought. He hadn’t really expected it to be that easy, and yet …

“Dan …” Adrian says, steel warning in his voice, “What are you doing, Dan?”

“ _Don’t be soft,_ ” says a voice in Nite Owl’s head. Nite Owl squeezes again.

Adrian knees Nite Owl in the stomach. Nite Owl doubles over, feels the back of Adrian’s hand smack against his cheek, knock him to the floor.

Nite Owl lies there for a moment, legs tangled in the pants of his costume (wings clipped). He waits, waits for when Adrian will stand above him, lecture him about disobedience and call him a little boy and grind his hands into the floor.

But he doesn’t. Instead Nite Owl can hear Adrian inhale deep, horrified breaths from his spot on the bed. Nite Owl pulls up his pants and leaps to his feet, not waiting to find out why.

Nite Owl knocks against Adrian with all his weight, but Adrian is ready for him. The man’s muscles are tense as he pushes back, pins Nite Owl to the bed and puts a hand over his mouth. Nite Owl bares his teeth, bites down hard enough to draw blood.

Adrian yanks his hand back, although Nite Owl still has some flesh between his teeth. He thinks of a raptor ripping its prey and attacks again. This time he catches Adrian in the neck, pushes him back against the bed and squeezes as he smashes his fist against Adrian’s face again and again. He can feel the nose break again, a tooth knock loose, blood on his gloves – his claws – and it feels like victory, it feels like retribution, and …

Adrian catches his arm in both hands, and before Nite Owl can think to break out of the hold he hears – and feels – a loud snap. He screeches in pain.

“There,” Adrian breathes out – exhausted and taken off-guard and nothing like the conniving, confident monster he and Rorschach found here six months ago. Adrian steps off the bed. “I don’t know what’s come over you, but you have to realize how foolish this is, how much you’re giving up. I’ve treated you too well. Perhaps some time back in the servants’ quarters –”

“I’m not going back there, Adrian,” Nite Owl growls, his hand curled around the broken place in his arm. He rolls onto his knees, back onto the balls of his feet, reaches for the knife from dinner (cut vegetables and rice) now hidden on the inside of his boot, and lunges off the bed and for Adrian. Adrian dodges but the bulk of Nite Owl still catches him, knocks him into the wall. (It’s only now that Nite Owl realizes with triumph that Adrian, unlike him, can’t see as well in the dark.) He aims for the throat, and while he misses he catches the shoulder, twists before ripping it out again.

“If I can’t kill you, then you’re killing me.”

Adrian yells and reaches for Nite Owl’s good hand. Nite Owl rips it away, ducks underneath to go for the stomach. It connects, although it gets caught in the folds of purple fabric, is easily ripped out of his hand.

Adrian grabs onto the top of Nite Owl’s cowl, taking a large hunk of his hair with it. He pulls Nite Owl upright and Nite Owl feels a fist slam into his face, feels blood run down his nose. Only this time he responds with a sharp kick to Adrian’s groin. Before he can feel glad about it, they’re both on the floor.

They shove and claw at each other, writhing together in close battle. Nite Owl’s heart pounds in his chest. He thought he had a chance. When he gets in a good hook that splits Adrian’s lip open he hopes he still does. Then Adrian finds Nite Owl’s useless arm, slams his fist down against the broken spot until Nite Owl screams.

“This can only get worse for you, Dan.”

Nite Owl grimaces through the pain, laughs bitterly. “You killed my friends. You took my freedom. You used my body. How the fuck can things get worse?”

Adrian’s face contorts into an expression which may be offense, then settles at anger. He squeezes again. Nite Owl seethes, socks Adrian in the eye. Adrian lets out a yell that Nite Owl associates more with a man doing martial arts than a man in a fight to the death (Is that all this is for him?), catches Nite Owl by the shoulders and pins him down. He leans over him, and blood drips onto Nite Owl’s face.

“Told you not to revel in pain. Do you think this will help you? Do you think this will make you a hero?” Adrian suddenly looks surprised, and then smiles. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about. That’s why you wanted to wear your stupid little suit, why you want to be called that name.” He snorts, blood bubbling from his nostrils. “You haven’t learned a thing.”

Adrian slaps Nite Owl hard enough that his teeth rattle.

“You’re right back where you started, thinking you can defeat me. You really think these useless acts of aggression will change anything? If you kill me my work will still live on. If you kill me I’ll still have changed the world and you’ll still be forgotten. Nothing but a blot in the snows of time.”

“Like I give a fuck.”

Nite Owl punches again, temporarily gains the upper hand, knocks Adrian against the floor and straddles him, grasps at his throat.

“Like you’ve offered me any shot at posterity. Like you’ve offered me anything I want or need.”

“I could have,” Adrian coughs, grasps at Nite Owl’s hand with his own. “You could have had the chance to see so much, Daniel, if only you asked. Instead you cling to the ravings of a psychopath, mistake them for a clear-eyed view of a complicated world.”

“A complicated world?” Nite Owl asks through clenched teeth. “You made my world nothing but pain and misery. It was pretty simple.”

“Fool. You made yourself miserable. You turned yourself into this. You could have made yourself better.”

Nite Owl squeezes the neck again. He’s realizing he can’t kill Adrian this way, but he’ll make it hurt as long as he can. “What kind of better? The kind of better where I’ll be the slave to your Pharaoh? Where I’ll tell you that you were right all along?” Nite Owl realizes his throat is dry, realizes this is the question he’s wanted answered for months and somehow, close to the end, he is finally asking it. “Is that what you wanted, Adrian? Someone who lost everything to see the light and assure you that you were right? Was that why you kept me here? Was I the most ironic person for the job?”

“I don’t seek validation from anyone, least of all you.” Adrian’s foot kicks into Nite Owl’s side. Nite Owl topples back onto the floor, yells as he lands on his bad arm.

Adrian stands up, walks over to Nite Owl with his hands behind his back. Like this, he reminds Nite Owl of a general, or of a king. Nite Owl tries to get up, tries to attack, but it all hurts so much.

“Then why?” Nite Owl asks, moaning through the pain. “If you hate me so much, if torturing me and fucking me is just a joke to you, why the hell did you want me here? Why didn’t you just fucking kill me?”

Adrian raises an eyebrow. “Are you trying to shame me by accusing me of having too much mercy?”

“Mercy?”

Nite Owl leaps up into a crouch, sends one leg flying at Adrian’s left shin. It gives with a sickening crunch.

Adrian cries out, falls back on the bed. Nite Owl sees the knife on the floor, scrambles over toward it. It feels awkward in his left hand, but he holds it firmly as he runs over to Adrian. Adrian rolls, and the knife hits the bed.

“Dan, think about what you’re doing!” Adrian yells.

“That’s not my name anymore,” Nite Owl says, ripping the knife out of the bed. “And I have. I’ve thought about it a lot.”

Adrian crawls backward on the bed with his arms, his one leg useless, his movements like a crab or a spider. “Don’t. I can fix your arm. I can protect you from the police.”

“There’s nothing you can do for me,” Nite Owl sneers.

Nite Owl prepares to lunge forward, go for the heart, but Adrian inhales sharply, speaks.

“I can tell you why I let you live.”

Nite Owl freezes. Adrian’s holding his hands out to him, like he’s in a defensive stance, like he’s ready to push Nite Owl back at any moment. And Nite Owl knows he shouldn’t, knows he’s only making this harder for himself, but he lowers the knife.

Adrian’s face is cold and serious, although Nite Owl can see the hint of fear behind it. Adrian lowers his hands.

“I didn’t plan this,” Adrian said. “When the four of you converged here at Karnak I had very little idea of how to deal with you. I thought of killing you, but … well, it seems that Jon and Laurie did half of my work for me.” (Nite Owl’s hand grips harder around the knife, although he doesn’t raise it.) “If she hadn’t died, if you hadn’t attacked me and we had come to an agreement about the new peace, I probably would have let you go. But you forced the issue.

“I thought of killing you after you attacked. It would have been easier. Since you attacked first, it would have even been justified. But …” Adrian trails off. When he speaks again, the confidence is drained from his voice. “I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t apologize for what I did, Dan, but I don’t take it lightly, either. You told me I don’t care about who I’ve killed but I’ve tried to make myself feel every death, remember every bit of pain I caused. Yet … I also knew forgetting would be easy. It’s been years since my parents’ deaths and they’re so … I find I can barely remember … well, you must understand.”

He doesn’t.

“I …” Adrian sits up as much as he can, reaches a hand toward Nite Owl and strokes his cheek. Nite Owl’s too shocked to do anything in response. “I could so easily forget. Go back to New York. Start a new life. Make new products for a new world. Help pass new legislation. Get a new lynx. I could return to the world and in the process forget it. But you … You would never let me. Whether you hated me forever or grew to love me with all your heart it wouldn’t matter because I would look at you and know that I had condemned you to this fate. I’d taken your freedom and had to live with it. I’d come closer to understanding your pain and … oh, I know you wouldn’t believe me but sometimes it’s been … sometimes I don’t even know what I … oh …”

Adrian kisses Nite Owl, forces his tongue inside his mouth and Nite Owl can’t move, can’t think. Then Adrian breaks the kiss, speaks again.

“I took your freedom and let you live so I could remember that I was a monster. You weren’t my forgiveness, Daniel. You weren’t my absolution. You were my punishment.”

Adrian’s arms wrap around Nite Owl. His chin rests on his shoulder. It’s the most affectionate, kindest thing that Adrian has ever done to him. It feels not only real, but for once, true, and there’s a part of Nite Owl – maybe the part of him that is disgusted by what he is now, maybe the part of him that’s stupid – that wants to melt into the hug for the sake of it. Yet there’s the bigger part that realizes what it means, realizes all the more that Adrian has appropriated and perverted everything he is, everything he ever was, for his own purposes, even Nite Owl’s own rage and pain.

Everything here is Adrian’s.

Was Adrian’s, Nite Owl thinks, and he raises the knife.

~*~*~

When it’s all over, when the vibration of the last impact has faded from Nite Owl’s arm, he does not feel a cleansing fire. His body is bruised. His ribs are cracked. His arm is broken, and he feels nothing but emptiness.

The walls of Karnak loom large and impossible around him without their master. Without Adrian, like him, they are nothing but empty space.

“ _Nothing beside remains. Round the decay  
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,  
The lone and level sands stretch far away._ ”

Nite Owl lies on the bed, lies in the blood and remains of his victim, and sleeps.

~*~*~

When he opens his eyes Laurie – no, Silk Spectre, that’s how these things work – is in the bed too, blood caked beneath her nails, spread across her mouth. Her head is turned toward Nite Owl, and her eyes are back, full of sadness.

“ _Hi, Dan_ ,” she whispers.

His chest feels so tight. (He still didn’t think he had a heart to break.) He reaches for her, and she takes his hand.

“ _I’m sorry_ ,” Silk Spectre says. “ _If I’d known it would turn out this way for you, I never would have done it._ ”

Nite Owl doesn’t know if that’s true or a beautiful lie he wants to tell himself and has filtered through her mouth, but he wants to believe it, wants it so much.

“Well,” he says, “maybe there was no other way for this to end.” Although he doesn’t really think that, can’t let go even now of fantasies of her alive and them together, running in the night, fighting like they’ll never be old. Nite Owl and Silk Spectre. Nite Owl and his beautiful, battered soulmate.

(He never could have done this without her.)

Silk Spectre blinks back tears, runs her thumb along his hand. “ _Probably,_ ” she says. “ _We’ve always got to dream of something better though, don’t we? Always got to want more?_ ”

“I don’t know,” Nite Owl says. “I’ve been considering worse possibilities quite a lot.”

She laughs. Laughs in that dark, cynical way that’s so her. It aches.

“ _Can you forgive me?_ ” she asks.

Nite Owl sighs, feels the tears well up in his eyes.

“No,” he says. “But I understand.”

Silk Spectre nods and leans forward. They kiss.

“Will I see you again?” he asks.

But he doesn’t know the answer to that question, so she is gone.

~*~*~

Nite Owl searches Karnak before he leaves, tries to take anything that will help him. He collects some food and water in a bag. He finds some medical supplies to splint his arm. He ends up finding the snowsuit, somehow, too, although the belt seems to be lost. After some hesitation he also returns to the newspaper morgue, struggles with his one good arm to open the drawers. The journal is still there. He closes Laurie’s earring in between the pages and puts that in the bag, too.

There’s no vehicle to help him on his way. He could call for help – at one point thinks of phoning Sally Jupiter – but she’s figured out so much already. All it could do is hurt her again.

He wonders if there’s any point to this. He thinks of Paris briefly but only to realize that’s not what he wants anymore. (They’ve always been so cruel to each other.) He probably won’t find Archie, anyway, and Archie most likely won’t work if he does. Yet he wants to be out of here, wants to try to fly.

He thinks of stopping back to the bedroom, of paying respects before he leaves. Then he remembers Adrian at Blake’s funeral, and decides against it.

~*~*~

The door opens easily, not needing a code or a burning laser to break. Apparently the snow and ice and death were always enough to keep people inside.

He understands. Even in the snowsuit the cold hits him like a punch from God. He’d forgotten just how cold it was, six months ago. He walks out of Karnak, the bag wrapped in his good hand, blood occasionally dripping from his arm, his nose.

When he gets a half a mile away, his toes already starting to freeze, he realizes how large everything is outside. He turns his gaze up to the darkening, cloudy sky, looks at the large stretch of snow and ice around him, and he feels smaller than ever, weak and easily snuffed out, but also free.

The feeling carries him very far, although not far enough.

~*~*~

Hours later a song runs through his head.

“ _Angels have no thoughts of ever returning you  
Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?_ ”

No, he thinks. He’s a murderer. They all are. It won’t be heaven where they meet, and Adrian will probably be there, too.

~*~*~

Yet near the end, when the freezing cold that’s gotten into every part of him hurts less somehow, when his joints move with such easy freedom that he suspects he may not actually be conscious, may actually be lying in the snow, dying and hallucinating, Nite Owl sees him.

Rorschach stands and waits as Nite Owl runs to him. When Nite Owl arrives he gasps and pants with exertion and relief, and the cold does not hurt his lungs.

“I thought I wouldn’t get to … I wanted to …”

Rorschach makes a noise, something deep and rumbling and indicating he understands. Then he turns away, points to the horizon. “ _Look …_ ”

Nite Owl does. At first, he doesn’t see anything. It’s just the ice and the snow and the sky. But then he realizes what’s happening, and his heart feels ready to burst.

“The sun …” he whispers. “It’s setting. Rorschach, the sun is setting! Night is coming. It’s … Oh God, I never thought I’d see it again.”

“ _I know._ ”

They hold hands as the sun descends beneath the horizon, as everything goes dark. Nite Owl breathes in, breathes out and then stops.

The End.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Gloomy Sunday" lyrics are by Rezső Seress (original Hungarian poem)/Sam Lewis (translator)  
> "Why should a horse, etc." is from _King Lear_ , Act V, chapter III by William Shakespeare  
> "Nothing beside remains, etc." is from "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley


End file.
